


Taking Pains

by SorrySorrySorry



Category: Midsummer Night's Dream - Shakespeare
Genre: M/M, Modern AU, and the rest of the mechanicals, morally reprehensible behavior, the gang's all here
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-12
Updated: 2018-02-05
Packaged: 2019-02-14 01:13:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 35,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12996615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SorrySorrySorry/pseuds/SorrySorrySorry
Summary: While Peter Quince and the rest of his newly christened band of actors would love nothing more than to leave the past behind them, the past is swift, stupid and unavoidable. Yet, as cruel as it is, Peter strives to make the best of a bad situation.





	1. Nick Bottom Has Big Feet

Hate. Not for the sake of hate. Not without reason. Peter Quince didn’t consider himself a terrible person, he considered himself a regular person who hated for regular reasons, because good God, there were  _ so many _ regular reasons.

Nick Bottom stood in the doorway wearing socks and sandals. He had sparkling, non-alcoholic sangria in a plastic bag at his side. “New haircut,” he said, pointing to his new haircut, sweaty digit hovering an inch away from his sweaty forehead.

Hate boiled low and slow in Peter’s stomach while his face stretched briefly, strained by the pressed line of his lips into the cheap imitation of a smile. In the movement of opening the door even an inch further, he found his arm stiff and his legs heavy as they shuffled aside to leave room. The better part of him was convinced he would have forced himself to say some form of welcome if not for the fact that Bottom was still talking. He would have said it, even if it hurt to bid the other inside. He wasn’t a monster. 

However, the fact was that he was easily overshadowed by the single, strong and solitary love of Bottom, which was the penetrable volume and reverberation of his own stupid voice. It was nothing aside from pointless noise, but he treated it as doctrine. Peter watched the man from behind and clicked his tongue. “Shoes,” he said with restraint, pointing to Bottom’s sandals. His feet were large.

“They’re Adidas,” he replied, smiling.

“I just got the carpets cleaned,” Peter continued, pointing.

After a moment of gear-turning thought, Bottom slid his sandals off, kicking them to the wall beside the door with a irritating collection of thumps. He must have noticed in the process how Peter’s face curled in distaste however the man tried to avoid it, as he allowed himself to be led down the hall to the kitchen. Yet, by the time they arrived there, the temporarily docile nature was entirely forgotten, and from behind him, Peter was privy to stares less subtle than his own.

The rest of the company sat around the kitchen island--Snug, Snout, Flute and Starveling--picking at grapes and frowning the moment Bottom looked in their direction. They cringed collectively as he set the sparkling juice down and greeted them as if they were old friends.

Familiar as they were, ‘friends’ was all too strong a term. The six of them shared the sort of odd, conjoined experience of friends, though none of them were willing to admit to any others that what had happened  _ had  _ happened. Any of them would admit to the rehearsal, the performance afterward, but never to the intermittent hijinks that took place in between. That was fake, or a classic case of mass hysteria. ‘Surprisingly common,’ according to Snug, who spent the day surfing the web with an unblinking scan in order to find an explanation he deemed appropriate. ‘Folie  à deux,’ he concluded. 

Despite his efforts, however, Bottom spoke about it in plain truth, and together, the company denied him. They weren’t friends. Peter received his due collection of unhappy looks.

_ ‘It’s not as if I begged him to come,’  _ he told them through his silent and resigned glances between each of their faces.

_ ‘But you  _ let _ him come,’  _ Flute shot back, eyebrows raised.

_ ‘Somebody let him find out about it, and it wasn’t me,’  _ Peter argued, turning his accusations on Snout.

_ ‘I said I was sorry,’  _ Snout shrugged before looking away.

Bottom interrupted the lot of them, vocally. “So, we’re going to put on another play?”

Stomach lurching, Peter shot Snout one last dagger for letting it slip before he adjusted himself to be more accomodating. Though, hard as he tried, he was still noticeably short. “Maybe. I was writing something. As far as ‘we’ goes…,” Peter looked about the kitchen, avoiding the pleading expressions he got from the peanut gallery. “...It might be a four-person thing...I might only have four roles that need to be filled…”

It was wrong to rely on Bottom’s supposed ability to do basic math. He looked briefly to the company, hands rested on his hips, and Peter’s temples began to pain him the moment Bottom’s lips parted for another round of speech. “So, one of you guys is gonna help with backstage stuff or something?”

“We were actually all pretty much decided on our parts already,” Flute cut in, speaking slowly so as to be understood by the great beast before him. “Us four.”

“So, who am I playing?”

“Well, there are no more parts left,” Starveling added, shrugging and popping a grape into his mouth.

Peter took to queue and elaborated before Bottom could interject, determined to make this bitter tag-team successful. “Right, there are no other parts. I wrote the four, and it was really a timing thing. You didn’t find out before all the parts were already assigned,” he said, scarcely stopping for breath, “And other than the parts, the set is minimal, so there isn’t anything the actors can’t do themselves. We already discussed it.”

They hadn’t, actually. Today was meant to be set aside for discussion, but with Bottom there--

“That’s rough,” Bottom said finally, taking some liberty he was in no way owed to seek out a glass from one of the kitchen cabinets. He pour himself a glass of sparkling juice, swirling the cup in his hand as if it was fine wine before taking a whole mouthful. The company waited, hoping to God for some conclusion, only to find that God was not listening. Bottom swallowed, looking Peter dead in the face. “How are you gonna write me in?” he asked.

And the moment the words flew from his mouth, stained redder now with the sangria scent on it, Peter mustered all of his will to suppress his urge to scream. A hand found its way to his forehead, pressing his hair back before scrubbing at his scalp. “That might be difficult. That might not be something I can accomplish,” he said, noting how high his voice had gotten the harder he tried to censor his rage.

“Anything is possible!” Bottom assured him, spilling sangria on his shirt. He clapped a meaty hand down on Peter’s shoulder, and something jumped low in Peter’s stomach. 

“Listen, Bottom, you might not be able to be in it,” Snout said finally, fists hitting the countertop; his face had grown red. “We’re going to go on a group trip pretty soon, and we were going to start rehearsing then, so it’s not feasible for you to drive out and join in.”

Snug brought a fist square into the side of Snout’s arm. No one had mentioned the trip previously, as it was meant to be their last fail-safe against Bottom’s direct interactions with the company. It was a final act of blessed seclusion, now already a distant dream.

More of his accursed voice: “Well, thank goodness you told me now! I can ask for the days off. When are we leaving?”

“There’s no time for you to do that. We’re leaving this weekend.”

Peter’s gaze, momentarily stuck on the upward view of Bottom’s face in close proximity to his own, shifted rapidly to the island again, where Flute had stood, speaking about plans that had yet to be made. He gave everyone a brief look, warning them all that they had better follow his lead. Understanding, two of the three still seated supplied their accompanying nods. Still, they were dealing with a force that was almost godlike in its naivety. 

“It’s cool, guys--I think I’ve got enough seniority now that they won’t mind if I call in for something like this. It’s for my career as an actor ultimately, right?”

It was as if the company was caught horrifically stranded in a labyrinth of unmatchable size, navigable only through words, and now it was evident their words could only fail them. It was futile, there were no exits. The minotaur was big, stupid, and ever-present. He wouldn’t leave until they engaged him in another twenty minutes of talking in circles, eventually giving away the time of their departure. Peter ushered him out the door with false thank-you’s seeping from behind his teeth, paper promises that he would look into adding another character to his working script. 

“I know you can work me in,” Bottom said in the doorway, framed by the bright orange of a sky that shouldn’t have had all that time to change color. 

Beautiful as it was, it was only a grim reminder of how horribly plans had gone awry, and through such reminders, Peter could hardly process what was being said to him. When it came to him, he struggled to respond through his headache. “We’ll see,” he sighed, leaning on the door frame for support.

“You’re a good writer. I trust you.”

Bottom smiled as if his opinion meant anything.

“We’ll see,” Peter repeated, shutting the door.

He waited with a hand wrapped around the knob until he was sure Bottom was gone, sinking to the floor was a heavy sigh. To side, he noticed the man’s sandals still sitting against his wall, and his face curled in disgust. How on earth had he walked off without them? Disgust  _ and _ annoyance. They were large. Disgust and annoyance and.

Still in the kitchen, the company beckoned, and with a heave, Peter pushed himself to his feet again. On his way there, he turned the lights on, feeling at once relaxed the moment Bottom’s absence truly set in. As a new addition, alongside the grapes, Starveling unveiled the drinks he had with him, casting the sparkling juice aside to pour for the company now that their social weight had been lifted. Only a few short minutes had passed, but already the mood returned to its proper comforts. Peter helped himself to a glass, downing in with shocking momentum. It erupted a shallow bit of laughter from Starveling, who quickly poured him another. Not long after, the laughter grew until they all encircled the island, picking grapes and taking sips as if they were real, genuine friends with one another. 

“Do you actually have anything written yet?” Snug asked over the rim of his glass, hand resting in the grape bowl.

Peter shook his head, already warm from his failure to pace himself. “But I’m not gonna let Ass-Face know that--He thinks ‘m gonna write him in. ‘Anything’s possible,’ he says…”

“You could’a told him you didn’t want him in it,” Snout replied.

“I did! You know he doesn’t fuckin’ listen! It’s like he doesn’t have an fuckin’ ears!”

“He had ears enough during last rehearsal,” Flute snorted, plaguing the others with a sudden silence the moment he forgot himself.

They all looked down into their glasses, drinking again until they could ease back into ridicule, until they could all silently agree that there was nothing unusual about Bottom’s ears last rehearsal, that nothing had happened. Following a developed pattern, it was Flute’s turn to divert the course of the conversation. He threw a grape in Peter’s face, speaking again. “Anyway, why’s it so hard for you to tell him no?”

“That dick game!” Starveling shouted, drinking straight from the bottle and punctuated by the heightened cackling of the company.

Hands came down in droves upon Peter’s back as he reddened, shrinking in his place. He thought of the sandals by the door and finished another glass. “As if. He’s king of the virgins.”

“That’s your fetish,” Flute giggled, tossing another grape, “Like taming the beast or some shit. Getting dicked down by a clueless blockhead.”

“Like that thing they do at the rodeo,” Snug added, “Where you have to stay on the bronco until you teach it what’s what.”

A subsequent and overlapping number of ‘yee-haw’s echoed around the room, each followed by rampant chuckling and another round of drinks. “What happens if you do teach it what’s what?” slurred Snout.

“You kill it,” said Starveling.

“No, that’s bullfighting,” said Flute.

“You can’t anyway, they castrate ‘em,” said Snug. “You can’t teach ‘em.”

Snout puffed out his chest, placing a hand on his hip in a drunken bastardization of their subject of humor. “‘You can do anything,’” he said in mock-exuberance.

The impression had Peter in stitches, and he beat at the countertop relentless in an effort to make it stop before he sides began to pain him. Blinded in humor, he reached for Flute at his side to steady himself, only for Flute to fall back on him, caught in laughter himself. He gripped Peter’s arm,  struggling for syllables as tears came to his eyes. “Listen, listen, listen, I would  _ pay _ you to figure out how to get him to shut up long enough to get him in bed.”

Howls of similar sentiment echoed him, as well as dollar sums. Another arm draped over Peter’s shoulders, another hand patting at his back. In a drunken mess of words, the company descended into a chant, a mixture of ‘tame that bronco’ and ‘take his virginity’. Peter finished another glass--his fourth? No, fifth. Third. 

“You can do anything!” someone said again.

“I can do anything,” he said back. “I can take his virginity.”

“And then kill him,” someone said.

“No, just the first part.”

Having reached the bottom of the bottle--was that the only bottle? Were there multiple bottles?--the company struggled for any among them to sober up enough to unlock a phone. There, they drew up a set of terms, some monetary amount and whatever else they could shove out, forces combined. Despite reading carefully through it, the words evaded Peter, turning to black in the same manner as the phone screen the moment it went to sleep. The night dissolved into nods and promises and the repeated reminder that they would depart on the weekend. Along with the phone notes, which were gone now in someone’s pocket, the car seating arrangements were scrawled on a piece of paper, nearly illegible.

Peter awoke in the still dark hours of the early morning and read them. He rubbed a dream out of his eyes, something about the company’s previous rehearsals that had frightened him into consciousness. Paper in hand, he stumbled to the fridge, and after a gulp of water, he gained the ability to read properly again. Either from the contents or the beginnings of a hangover, his headache returned.

Yes, it was nearly illegible, but it was his own handwriting, which he could read without fail. He had drawn a crude square for the car, an arrow leading from the driver’s seat to his own name, from shotgun seat to Bottom’s. Though it was only three in the morning, the paper robbed him of the ability to return with any kind of ease to bed. He wandered to his bedroom, dropping heavily into a seat at his desk and blinding himself with the click of his lamp coming on. While one hand thumbed through a line of ideas sketched on sticky notes stuck loosely to his wall, the other popped his laptop open. Tabs from the day previous still sat waiting for him. References, references, music, and finally, a single-page document still titled ‘unknown’. He dragged the mouse over it, changing the unknown to a generic other word. He had to write some script for four characters.

Peter’s eyes squeezed shut, his headache pulsing. No, it was five now.


	2. In the Stream

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Peter Quince and the rest of his newly christened band of actors would love nothing more than to leave the past behind them, the past is swift, stupid and unavoidable. Yet, as cruel as it is, Peter strives to make the best of a bad situation.

Though he didn’t want to, Peter stopped, posing a question he should have kept to himself. “What are you doing?” he asked pointedly, re-adjusting his bag on his shoulder to ready himself for whatever bullshit was to come from Bottom, who waded in the stream with his pants rolled up to his knees.

They were thirteen.

Bottom spun around in the water to get a good look at the source of sudden noise, smile spreading across his face the moment he saw Peter at the shore. He picked at his face (which wasn’t doing the cratered mass of flesh any good) and pointed to a floating lump of wet paper, pages torn away from a wealthy collection of notebooks and folders. It was difficult to look at, because really, Peter knew what had happened. He had been there, at a distance, watching apathetically as Bottom’s bag hit the water, even finding it a bit funny how the boy quickly pulled the sneakers off his feet to catch the homework being carried away in the current. In a damp pile now alongside his socks at the water’s edge, Peter was tempted to kick the sneakers in. He stepped back before the urge overcame him. 

“It’s a bummer, the guys that threw my bag in probably didn’t know all of my homework was gonna get soaked,” Bottom explained, leaning down and reaching for a notebook whose pages had been unceremoniously scattered from over the bridge’s edge.

“All of it?” Peter asked, knowing the answer; for whatever reason, he wanted to hear Bottom say it.

“Yeah, I’m gonna have to redo my writing assignment and stuff.”

“The five page one?” He wanted to hear Bottom say it.

“Yeah.”

“And you wrote it by hand, too, huh?”

“Yeah.”

Peter wanted Bottom to say it and realize it and stop smiling, but he wouldn’t, instead standing knee deep in the stream looking as ignorant as ever. Despite his efforts, his clothes were already wet, and beneath them, his chest heaved still from the futile pursuit of what now floated around him. Up and down beneath a shirt Peter swore the boy owned since elementary. The stupid smile was the same, as if he’d never let it leave. He’d always looked like that, lacking in the disillusionment Peter felt he was due, turning Peter’s stomach over like a putrid omelette. And speaking of things that were due--

“We have to turn those in tomorrow, you know.”

Bottom laughed, setting off a quick wince that Peter couldn’t withhold, and he picked up another notebook to add to the sopping stack in his arms. “Yeah. How’s yours going?” he asked.

A car passed overhead, and for a moment, Peter was paranoid of being seen where he was, holding discussion as he was. He was preparing an excuse in his head, something along the lines of ridicule or observation, all to avoid the former being directed at himself. His hands tightened around the strap of his bag. “I finished it two days ago,” he replied, recalling a single stretch of hard work on a library computer. In the end, it exceeded the minimum page requirement, and he was too proud of it to let anyone know about it, lest his efforts turn out as Bottom’s had. For whatever reason, he felt that telling Bottom hardly betrayed that caution. Who would he tell? He had no friends, rightfully so.

“Oh man, I bet it’s good.”

Peter shrugged.

“Can I see it?”

There was enough of a pause between them for another few cars to pass, for Peter to consider the utterly regrettable. He pointed to the backpack half-submerged in the stream. “Get your stuff before the fish eat it. I’ll wait.”

“Are there fish in here?” Bottom questioned, eyes on the water now as he struggled to fit everything in his arms. “I know there are crawdads and stuff. Remember when we used to come down and catch crawdads?”

“No.”

“Oh.” Bottom lost as many papers as he could pick up, finally doing what he should have in the beginning and reaching for the backpack to dump them into. Water sloshed around him as he dragged what he had to the stream’s edge, and Peter stepped back to avoid the splash, irritated at having to take the necessary action. He watched with narrowed eyes while Bottom waded out to land, plopping down on the pebble mound that turned slowly to dirt before it became grass again. His feet sat still in the water, dotted red at the soles from an unforgiving waterbed, his hands picking up bits of gravel when he dared to rest on them. With one, he patted the earth beside him, beckoning for Peter to come sit. 

Peter would most assuredly stand. Stiff in the spine, he swung his bag around to the front, digging through it until he found the folder, the stack of pages laying crisp inside. As he held it out, he grew tentative. “Are you hands dry?” He was stern, and more protective than he’d ever considered being for any living thing.

With a nod, Bottom was granted the assignment, the pass from one set of hands to another riddled with Peter’s regret. It was too late to snatch it back now. Wary, Peter fiddled with the hem of his shirt, looking away as the glances he granted to both Bottom and his own work stung his eyes like bee stings or paper cuts. While he didn’t consider Bottom’s opinion particularly valid or valuable, his cheeks grew habitually warm, and words spilled out of his mouth on impulse. “I might still make some edits tonight. It’s not that great. It’s supposed to be kind of confusing, so if you don’t get it--”

“No, it’s cool. I like it. I can sorta...like, I can tell you wrote it.”

Peter froze, deer in the headlights. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, defensive.

Bottom scratched at his head, urging his thoughts out and into the open. “Like...you have a kind of style? Like, a personal style. It’s kind of dramatic, like the stuff we read in class sometimes. It’s cool.”

Self-justifying explicatives froze in Peter’s throat. He was red and angry because of it. The moment he thought Bottom had reached the end of the last page, he snatched the stack away, holding it close to his chest. “Well, I worked pretty hard on it, so...yeah.” 

“I wish you could’a read mine. It was almost as good as that,” Bottom sighed, looking lazily now through the wet pile of his belongings. He found a couple of pages, half-dried, writing faded. Whole sections had broken away under his touch, victims of the paper’s flimsy fibers. He held one sliver of the assignment out, the driest part, for Peter to take and examine.

It was the middle of a paragraph in the middle of a story, and that aside, Peter was unimpressed. The author alone gave him a critical pretense, and he believe every thought after was justified. “Why’d you write it in second person?”

“Second person is neat. It’s like you’re talking right at the reader.”

“It’s tacky. When you rewrite this, just make it in first person. Don’t underestimate the ability of the reader to empathize with your subject. Is the color green supposed to be a running motif or something?”

“Uh…,” Bottom got on his knees, twisting to read where Peter was reading. “...No, I think that’s just that part,” he said.

“Then you don’t need all of this. You make it seem like the green stuff is really important to the story, and it’s distracting. Sensory details are good, but if you add too many it gets annoying. When you’re writing a new sentence, stop and consider what it adds to the story. It has to either reveal something about your character or move the plot along. It might cut down on your page count, but once you have the bare bones done, you can figure out what you need to add.”

“Wow.” Bottom took the paper back as if at had become more precious in its time away from him, and he handled it like an antique rather than the trash it was. “You kinda sound like the teacher.”

If Peter wasn’t already frowning, he certainly was now. He remembered where he was and what he was doing. “Whatever,” he said, tucking his own assignment back into his bag. “You have a lot of edits to make before tomorrow. It wasn’t that good.”

Standing, Bottom hoisted his own bag over his shoulder, soaking the only dry section of his back. “It’s a good thing you were here, then. I got lucky,” he said.

“Don’t tell anyone,” Peter replied, making a note of Bottom’s height. It was as if the puberty of three people was hitting him, and Peter hated it among everything else. “ _ Swear _ you won’t tell anyone.”

Bottom crossed his heart, giggling like a child. “I swear,” he said.

With hot cheeks, Peter found it all decidedly too much. In one swift motion, he bent down, picking Bottom’s sneakers up by the laces and swinging them with such a ferocity that when he let go, they went flying into the stream with an incredible splash. Together with Bottom, he watched as they sunk below the water, and continued watching, expression blank, as Bottom set his bag down and went in to get them.

“Sorry,” Peter called, monotone. “I thought I saw somebody sneaking up on you.” He made no effort to hide the fact that he was lying. 

More than anything, Peter wanted Bottom’s face twisted the way his insides felt, wound in overwhelming frustration, and when he received a patient smile and a thank you instead, he was livid. It would have been healthiest if he left it there; he was already long past when he said he’d be home and was now due for a scolding, but he couldn’t manage to tear himself away from the sight of the other wading around, pant legs slipping down from being poorly rolled at the knees. Unsatiated, he gave Bottom’s backpack a swift kick, eyes drifting to the other the moment it rolled into the stream. He waited. Bottom spun at the sound, shoes in hand, and Peter met his gaze. 

“I’ll, uh. I’ll see you tomorrow,” Bottom called back.


	3. Nick Bottom is a Heavy Sleeper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Peter Quince and the rest of his newly christened band of actors would love nothing more than to leave the past behind them, the past is swift, stupid and unavoidable. Yet, as cruel as it is, Peter strives to make the best of a bad situation.

The trees, tall, shadowed and constant, made Peter deeply uncomfortable in a way they never used to before the rehearsals over the summer. Now, the gaps in them, peeking in to an even further stretch of woods, green and brown and black, begged to be filled with movement of the unexplainable variety. Look too long, and Peter ran the risk of seeing something. Look too long, and Peter ran of the risk of reflecting on what had happened. He couldn’t look too long. He had to drive.

Bottom snored, and like that, Peter’s attention was back in the vehicle, back on the road ahead. It meant his headache was back, and he squeezed the wheel, granting a fleeting glance in the rearview mirror to the company in the back, all asleep on one another. Though the consistent and throbbing pain in his temples kept him awake, he resented them. Especially now, in the woods like before, he craved something tangible. It was a mistake, but he extended an arm.

“Bottom.”

With a snort and a quick shiver, Bottom’s head snapped up from its firm press against the window. Peter’s hand was on him for a fraction of a second before it was withdrawn, retracted in aversion as Bottom dragged his palm across the drool set on his chin. “Are we there yet…?” he yawned.

“No. Almost. Can you check how many miles we have left?”

Nodding, Bottom stretched in a space that was all too small for him to do so, cracking something in his back as he found the phone in the cupholder. He reached to the other side of himself, fishing around beneath the seat until he found his glasses resting in a slot in the door. He pushed them on, getting a fingerprint on the lens, and after another yawn, he found what he wanted on the bottom of the screen. “ETA is fifteen minutes from now,” he said, squinting at the bright flash of light in the dark.

Peter breathed. “Fuck.”

“Tired?”

Readjusting his grip to a fresh ten-and-two, he afforded another look away from the road, a few seconds on Bottom again. With the sun set and the company asleep, he felt that if it was anyone else, he might have had the proper seclusion to admit something. “Yeah, tired.” Anyone else, but not Bottom.

“The woods are kinda spooky at night,” Bottom remarked, eyes on the flash of trees out the window. The blame was on Peter for waking him up. It was an act of blatant stupidity, or of masochism. He wouldn't stop talking now.  “Were the woods from last rehearsal this spooky, or were they normal? I remember ‘em being pretty normal. Except for the obviously not-normal stuff, right? The stuff with the f--”

“No, it was all normal.” Although he continued to face forward, Peter could feel Bottom’s eyes on him. He could picture the smudge in the corner of the man's lens without having to see the bit of color it obscured. He bit his lip, and their conversation was surrendered to the hum of the road.

Whether it was because of the utter lack of traffic in any form or because Peter was too tired to make any note of the speed limit, the fifteen minutes had shifted to a soft ten. The car pulled up a gravel drive, settling still a ways away from the looming figure of the company’s rented cabin. Vacant, it was nothing more than a different configuration of logs from the towering forest around it, and when the headlights went off, it was the sort of disruption of nature that sent a chill down Peter’s spine. Without meaning to, he wouldn’t budge; he was frozen beneath the assortment of blackened firs while Bottom thrust the passenger door open, turning on every light in the car to the chagrin of those asleep in the back. They awoke in a string of groans, all save for Snout, who could likely sleep through a typhoon if not for Snug’s reliable fist digging straight into his shoulder to wake him. In a disgruntled line, they filed out onto the path, bags in tow, hands over eyes as they rubbed the fatigue out of them. Flute’s hand finally found its way down against the driver’s side window, and Peter was startled into joining them.

“You’re not gonna get a good bed if you don’t hurry up,” Flute warned, leading the other up the path with nothing behind them but the encroaching nighttime. He held the door open, unafraid, continuing his thought. “And you’re not gonna get anywhere with the bet if you don’t get a bed.”

“Don’t underestimate me,” Peter mumbled. “There’s always the hot tub.”

They giggled over it, the last to make it inside, but in turn, welcomed into a room that was already lit, albeit littered with the bags of the others who were already lounging wherever there was room. Flute was no better, throwing a backpack on top of another and kicking what he needed to out of the way to the kitchen. “Did you actually read over the bet conditions? I remember us making conditions,” he said, picking absently at his beard.

Peter crossed his arms, leaning in the kitchen archway. “On whose phone?”

Flute chuckled. He looked up over the door of the fridge. “No fucking clue.”

“What kind of conditions?”

“I’m assuming we made a time limit,” he said. “Maybe some regulation on position.”

“Like, I get an extra twenty for anything other than missionary?”

Flute shrugged. “I’m not gonna check. Go crazy.”

From above, their attention was drawn by heavy footsteps, the kind that could only belong to one person, because when one spoke of the devil, he had to materialize and make noise. It was as if he was walking directly on Peter’s skull as the man’s head throbbed. He sighed, hands cupped around his face, and extended the noise into a long groan, more audible and blatantly dramatic in company. “Not tonight. I’m tired. And I still have to finish the script!”

Unforgiving as he was, Flute was no longer laughing with Peter, but at him, shutting the fridge and passing by him with a pat on his back. “Just don’t make me a girl again,” he said, leading Peter by the shoulder up the stairs; he made it a point to pull at his beard again.

“No, not a girl--a distinguished young woman.”

Flute shot him a look. “Just don’t make Ass-face my love interest again. I’ll gag. He’s not my type.”

“Whatever you say, Thisbe.”

“I’m serious. The only person he should be sweating over is you.”

“Gross--,” so Peter said, but the thought of it already had him more motivated than before. It was against his better judgement as well as it was against his control, the way his face grew immediately warmer. Failing to control it, his gaze immediately fell in the direction the footsteps were coming from, earning him another pat on the back once he reached the top of the stairs. In order to tear himself away from the string of thought, ‘not tonight’ became his personal mantra. Not tonight, because he was tired, and he could do it himself without the added coercion. Not tonight, because Flute was there and aware and laughing at him.

Yet, Peter’s efforts meant nothing to the mechanical motion of his legs. He hadn’t put enough willpower into suppressing himself, and soon, his hand was on the wrong doorknob, pushing open the only door he should have avoided. When it opened, he crept inside, eyes landing instantly on what he was hoping to avoid and gluing themselves there. His jaw clenched.

“Hi Peter.”

“Put a shirt on, Bottom.”

Standing there, thumbing at the waistband of his pajama pants, taunting Peter. Bottom nodded, reaching for what he already had laid out on the bed--yes, it was a singular bed, set against the cabin wall and made to overlook a balcony and the expanse of the forest below. There were unlit candles on either side of the dresser. Not tonight.

“The guys told me there was a desk in here. I need a desk. I need to finish the script,” Peter said, gathering his thoughts into one cohesive lie.

Of course, it had its holes, but Bottom was only host to a few meager IQ points. He looked around in a room he had likely been standing in for several minutes now. “I don’t think there’s a desk,” he responded, still shirtless. Shirt in hand, but not on. Torso bare. “Are you almost done?”

“What?”

“With the script?”

As if to expel his distractions, Peter shook his head quicker than he may have needed to. “Not even close,” he replied.

With another nod, Bottom wiggled his shirt over his head. In perhaps his physical prime, he spoke with it over his face. “What’s it about?”

They were due to rehearse in the morning, but there was nothing that Peter wanted more than to insist that that sort of information was none of Bottom’s business. He set his own bag on the bed, took a good, long look at Bottom’s torso before it disappeared behind a faded Batman insignia and remembered himself. Mostly, he remembered that he had yet to write anything worthwhile. He pinched the bridge of his nose, eyes squeezing shut. “It’s going to be another tragedy. So-and-so and What’s-his-face fall in love. Something’s keeping them apart. Original, right?” He laughed bitterly before he dug into his bag for his laptop.

“Am I So-and-so or What’s-his-face?”

Peter frowned. “Neither. You…,” he paused, popping the laptop open to his ever-present document. As it had been for days, his place was marked with a thin, blinking line that had begun to taunt him. It was time, finally, to make a move a few solid inches. He typed as he spoke. “...You are what’s keeping them apart...You thwart the lovers...and ultimately drive them to suicide.” He looked over the top of the monitor, still frowning. He wanted something, but didn’t receive it.

Bottom was pleased. “I get to be the villain?” he asked, excitement playing heavily in his voice.

It had all the power of a needle in a balloon. “...You’re really just a despicable piece of shit. You consistently assume you’re wanted when you’re actually a persistent annoyance, and when everyone’s clearly suffering because of you, all you can do with your all-encompassing ego is divert the blame to something else entirely. Everyone hates you and wishes you’d get lost.”

Bottom leaned against the wall, arms crossed. He nodded again as if he understood completely. “That’s gonna be awesome,” he said. “I can play a really good villain.”

Like a magic trick, a mere flash of a camera in the darkness, Peter’s inspiration was gone. Hand sweeping clean and quick through his hair, he returned to his bag, finding something to sleep in this time. He had to sleep, because there was nothing else from writing if not unconsciousness. The laptop shut with a click, put away as soon as it had been revealed, and Peter peeled his jeans off before he devoted another thought to where he was. When the pants hit the floor, he considered Bottom, still in the corner of the room, and made direct eye contact with him. “I don’t want to think anymore tonight--not about writing or anything else. I want to go to bed,” he said.

“Oh yeah, it’s super late,” Bottom agreed; it was impossible to tell if he had his hands in his pockets for any particular reason or they were just there.

Either way, Peter was staring more intensely than what could be deemed a casual passing glance between either friends or enemies. His tongue slid out over his lips, and suddenly his mantra returned, screaming, into his head. Mindful of the contents, he moved his bag to the floor, taking its place with the addition of a number of blankets. “There aren’t any other open beds, so we have to make do,” he said, already reaching for the light. Not tonight, though.

“I could just go take the couch…?”

“No, it’s fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“It’s fine, Bottom.”

Not tonight. Peter listened, face half-buried in his pillow and head half-shielded by his blankets, as Bottom shuffled over to the far side of the bed, and he felt the cold on an exposed portion of his back as the man lifted the covers to climb in. Peter pulled inward in an attempt to make himself smaller, feeling an unintentional amount of breath on his back. “Uh...goodnight, Peter.” He didn’t respond, instead waiting, eyes open and burning in the dark. Head throbbing. It was quiet, even absent of the typical ambiance of the forest, until Peter surrendered his will to his setting. The chill between his feet, pushing tightly into their opposing calves, couldn’t last with the other man at Peter’s back, and soon, he began to focus on the other’s breathing, loud and unsteady as it was. In no time, the chill was gone, giving way to a sinister, low boil.

Having never actually gotten his pajamas on, Peter thought fleeting about where they were on the ground. A hand slid out from under the covers, trailing down the side of the mattress where it hung, fingers curling and giving up for what started as only a small percentage of effort. He couldn't reach. When Peter pulled inward again, that same hand rested dangerously close to his thighs, to where he was warmest. He felt himself through his underwear, focusing again on the breathing over his shoulder as his fingers slipped languidly beneath the fabric. His head rolled to hide further in his pillow where he bit down as a touch turned to a stroke. Whether or not it was a fundamental problem of the imagination, he was dissatisfied with himself, wanting for whatever he pictured Bottom capable of. It light of that absence, he grew resentful, shutting his eyes and trying to compensate for what his hand lacked in size with an ungainly flourish. He dared Bottom awake to finish him off, moaning softly as he discovered instead that the man slept like a log. While he got his own share of mileage out of the position, it would be another agonizing minute before Peter came, rolling onto his back solely for the sake of getting a glimpse of Bottom before what was ultimately a disappointing conclusion. He heaved a heavy sigh, laying still for another moment, staring and comparing the rise and fall of Bottom’s chest to his own. Peter brushed his knuckles across the man’s cheek, less in tenderness than in testing how easy it might be to punch him or wake him or do him some other injustice than the immorality that had already occurred.

In avoidance of any further urges, Peter then slid out of bed, stumbling out into the hallway in search of the bathroom. No longer aroused, he fell back on his original Bottom-associated feelings of repulsion and loathing. He descended from the second floor with a stunning lack of shame, surprised at how quickly everyone had gotten to bed after him. It served him well, as he wandered with the results of his orgasm splayed over his palm, unable to find either a sink or a light switch in the dark and not particularly wanting to be found himself. Dragging the other, cleaner hand along the wall, Peter crept across the threshold into the living room. He froze, floor creaking beneath him, as he became privy to the dim light of a computer and the familiar tapping of keys.

“Peter. What are you doing up?”

It was Snout, sitting at the couch with the lights off. He spoke without looking away from what he was working on, which was all well and good for obvious reasons.

“Tom. I could ask the same.”

“I started an argument in my Local Urban Legends Discord. I noticed you and Bottom went straight to sharing the master. Did you guys do it? I didn’t hear anything.”

Peter pulled his shirt down over himself. “No. Were you trying to listen in?”

“No.”

“Well. Good. Don’t. That’s my business--”

“--That we bet on and discussed as a group.”

Faced with nothing but the truth, Peter nodded in the darkness, returning to the task at hand. He reached the bathroom door with a surprising ease now that his eyes had adjusted, but he lingered. He felt the need to get the last word in, or at least make an attempt. To bring some dignity to the underwear and jizz-in-hand combination. “See you in the morning, Tom.”

“Do you even have a script for us?”

“No. I was going to write it right now.”

Snout finally looked at the other from over the back of the couch, eyebrows raised. Again, Peter pulled at his shirt, thinking of his pants upstairs and cursing himself for leaving them there. It was another brief reminder that no one in the company was necessarily his friend, because he felt that he might not have felt as uncomfortable in some of his nicer underwear in front of his friends. (That was, of course a guess. He'd never had friends and taken his pants off in front of them.) As an acquaintance at best, either Snout was too tired to notice or, more likely, willing himself to overlook it. “Godspeed,” he said, looking past Peter more than he was looking directly at him.

Peter turned the sink on, assuming Snout was willing to overlook the hand as well. He used extra soap.


	4. Under the Hive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Peter Quince and the rest of his newly christened band of actors would love nothing more than to leave the past behind them, the past is swift, stupid and unavoidable. Yet, as cruel as it is, Peter strives to make the best of a bad situation.

The air was unusually brisk, and in a rare event, a sprinkling of leaves tough enough to crunch paved a pathway of sound through the wilderness. Orienteering as a mandated adventure and show of skill had been forgotten by its participants the very second a hand was raised in the air, an index finger unfolding to indicate the grayish folds of the natural sphere sitting high in the branches of a young sequoia. Instantly, standard-issue binoculars were being fished quickly out of each and every backpack, and hungry eyes peered through their lenses to confirm what could only be supposed upon: up in the tree there was the undeniable activity of the sphere’s fierce inhabitants, a powerful colony of wasps, whose buzzing could steadily be heard when a boy cupped his hands around his ears and trained them in that direction as they all had been shown to do in a nighttime game of hide-and-seek long ago. 

According to fashion, the scouts abandoned their path, lining up instead at a distance from the nest according to the direction of the two eldest. They were, incidentally, the only ones in the group who bore a sacred patch--rather, the tabs of old soda cans affixed to their lapels with a safety pin and adorned each with a small, blue ribbon. Beyond the name, the Precision Patch, all the meaning of the emblem was lost upon the adults, though it sat ever-present in the minds of every boy in the troop; to them, it was equal in importance to any other facet of their uniforms, with the added condition of its secrecy which made it special. Newer boys could only learn the meaning through witnessing the events leading up to its reward first-hand. They would watch as the object of group ridicule, unlucky to be present on such a day, stood beneath the patch’s catalyst with his back mere inches from the redwood trunk. The ones possessing the patch already paced back and forth about the line, refreshing the minds of everyone regarding traditional procedure. Peter stood toward the end, eyes trained on the collection of stones gathered carefully by his feet. Bottom stood beneath the sequoia, and subsequently, the nest, fidgeting until he was warned not to by the older boys.

They were eleven.

With his hands folded formally behind his back, the eldest first explained the surreptitiousness that must be associated with the Precision Patch before an attempt could even begin to be made at describing the process, let alone earning it. “If the scoutmaster finds out,” he told them, “the fun will be ruined for everyone and the practice likely banned.” The line of scouts was silent as he continued on into the simple cause-and-effect that would earn any number of them a patch of their own. 

The stones were passed efficiently down the line of boys, ranging in size from penny to ping-pong to softball. Each boy was given one, and the two already granted the patch stood to the side, the elder leader holstering a dart gun in the pouch on his pack meant to carry a thermos. He pointed, and Bottom’s eyes followed his finger straight up to where the wasps were laying in wait, meters above his head. Should anyone throw their stone and hit that nest, the patch was theirs. Should no one hit it, the dart gun was waiting out of Bottom’s line of sight. 

To avoid confusion, the process was methodical, going one at a time according to the name called by the second eldest. It was the best way to ensure that no one pussied out, that their stone was not abandoned or thrown too far astray, but the pace of the names began to pick up as the troop size was less accommodating to a single stone’s throw and a breath in between every time. By the time it came to a single hesitation between names--two or three stones in the air at a time, all missing by a narrow margin--it was closing in on Peter’s turn. He turned his stone over briefly in his hands. It was smooth and flat like a disc, about as wide as the end of spoon, but he wouldn’t find his reflection in it, inverted or otherwise. Looking away, down the line (never directly at Bottom), he waited, thinking hesitantly to himself about the proper amount of force to use. 

“Fletcher...Kyd...Quince--”

Peter threw, already knowing from the moment the stone left his hand that it wasn’t nearly enough, instead travelling so far beside the target that he might have been ridiculed if not for the increasing pace of the names in order to hastily reach the finish. Without meaning to, he caught a glimpse of Bottom’s face as his stone disappeared beyond the lower treeline, and for only a fraction of a second, he saw something nearly grateful. He wasn’t, however, given the time to decipher the image before another stone went flying not in an upward trajectory, nor in the typical arc of the others, but instead spiraling directly ahead, its powerful velocity meeting its match in the flesh above Bottom’s right eye. What sounded as a single  _ thump  _ sent the boy reeling, knocking him off his feet into an inanimate pile on the ground. A few weak giggles arose from the line, and the eldest had his dart gun aimed in the air, ready to fire. He waited, and soon the giggling died for the perceived lack of pained whining of any kind coming from the body twisted up against the sequoia trunk. A minute passed, and the gun was lowered, instead prodding against the side of the second eldest, who agreed to step forward and assess the situation. On first instinct, he tapped apathetically at Bottom’s limbs with his boot, eventually sinking down into a crouch to turn the boy over. “Quince!” he called, beckoning over his shoulder.

Peter stood at attention, moving forward as he pulled his pack off quick as he was able. He waited for the instruction he was only ever called for, hands finding the handle of the first aid kit he’d been informally placed in charge of. “Is he dead?” a boy shouted, the first to voice the most prominent fear now on everyone’s mind. 

Moving aside, the second eldest shook his head. When he turned, he revealed a small smile playing at the corners of his lips, one which spread to the other scouts as they took it in. “Concussion, most likely. Good shot,” he said. 

He stood again, allowing Peter now to begin in what was ultimately an amateur patch-job meant only to service Bottom while he was carried back to the infirmary. It was hurried, as the need to carry the boy back was treated as a nuisance, chalked up to an interruption of the orienteering that had previously been interrupted and justified by the collective agreement of the remaining scouts that Bottom had taken a particularly messy fall. It protected the confidentiality of the Precision Patch like it was always meant to, but the moment Bottom was put under the care of the adults and his mother was called, the atmosphere was dreadfully the same. The boys were sent back to their tents, left watching from there as an unfamiliar car tore up to the camp with a certain ferocity that sent chills down their spines. Rumors over the appearance of the woman that hopped out spread before real glimpses of her could combat them, and only Peter was able to prove anything, as he had been made to continue his duties as a medical aid to the best of his youthful ability.

This meant that Peter was in charge of sitting at Bottom’s side in the main lodge, either waiting for an adult to dismiss him or for Bottom to pass out again so he might leap into action and have something to do. Until that point, he sat with his hands folded in his lap, eyes on the small square of glass on the door to the scoutmaster’s office. Within its frame, he caught sight and accompanying sounds of a single-sided argument, the worst scolding he’d ever heard in his life. As unsettling as it was, though, what truly caught him off guard came from outside the room, when Bottom actually found it in him to speak. He turned, ice pack pressed over that portion of his forehead just above his eye that still seemed to be bleeding. “Mom’s pulling me from scouts, I think.”

“That sucks,” said Peter, refusing to look at him. He overheard some harsh accusation from the office, some sentiment that no one’s son should have to be treated like this, with which he felt it was his duty to disagree. It wasn’t as if Bottom hadn’t instigated events through his disposition alone.

Even now, bleeding, he smiled. It was a mistake to look. “I’ll have a chance to do something new maybe. My cousin just went to acting camp, and she said that was fun. I could try that,” he said.

In the space meant for Peter’s response--perhaps an opinion or the reassurance that the other might be missed--there was only a lot of thumb twiddling and staring into space. He heard the scoutmaster’s vague mumbles, excuses that somehow had less validity than a group of children saying one of them had had a bad fall. That child eventually kept talking to fill the air, somehow startling Peter again.

“Thanks, by the way,” Bottom continued.

It was a mistake to look, but Peter did, taking in the asymmetry of one eye closed for the gash above it, the other open and bright as it always had been. Opposing it, Peter’s face wound in his own special combination of odium and confusion. “For what?” 

“For missing on purpose.”

“What?”

Bottom shifted in his seat. “With your rock,” he said, lifting the ice pack from his head to touch at the gash beneath; it was second nature to him, as it was to any scout, to poke at the wound to see how it hurt. “You made sure to miss on purpose, so you wouldn’t hit the bees or me or anything. Thanks.”

Before Bottom could go in for a high-five or a pat on the back, Peter moved a good few inches away, warm at the ears. His response caught in his throat, where it remained as the office door swung open, robbing him of the chance to argue. 

The woman that stepped out into the main room, frail as she was, stomped forward with more ferocity than every wasp in the hive combined. She marched over to Bottom, helping him out of his seat and holding his hand with a vice grip while she checked on his wound for herself. In caring for him, she was instantly tender, a behavior better suited to the pink, printed scarf wrapped around her head. She brushed the boy’s cheek with her thin fingers, eventually following his line of sight to Peter, still seated. Bottom waved, saying something to his mother in low voice to dissolve the mercilessness in her. Catching the word ‘friend’ among all else, Peter slid down from his place, scowling. “I didn’t know she had cancer,” he said in passing, leaving to see who had actually thrown the stone in the first place, earning a patch of their own.


	5. Nick Bottom Will Eat Anything

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Peter Quince and the rest of his newly christened band of actors would love nothing more than to leave the past behind them, the past is swift, stupid and unavoidable. Yet, as cruel as it is, Peter strives to make the best of a bad situation.

It took the combined forces of three in the company to even come close to locating Peter in the morning, and the single misstep of the fourth--an unsuspecting Starveling--to actually succeed in the task. 

The glow of the rising sun hit his face in panels, illuminating the look of a man who had just gotten up and was already exhausted. He held the shower curtain in front of himself, though he was standing outside the tub looking in. From the floor of the tub, Peter looked up from his writing, clapping his laptop shut and holding it over the portion of himself that he hadn’t had the mind to cover beyond a pair of underwear. Starveling covered less. He put one hand over his eyes, reaching for his phone on the counter with the other to pause his Spotify playlist.

“What time is it?” Peter asked, shadows under his eyes.

Unable to navigate a phone screen without having to look, Starveling left the music playing. “It’s morning, Peter,” he said. “Did you sleep in here?”

“No. Sleep? No. No, no, no.” Peter climbed out the tub, maneuvering carefully so as to not breach the two-foot radius of Starveling’s personal bubble. He backed toward the door and struggled with the knob because of how unwilling he was to move the computer away from where it was at his waist. “I was just finishing the script,” he clarified. 

Starveling nodded dismissively. “That’s fine. I was just going to shower, so...uh. The guys were looking for you.”

“Right, thank you.” Not without slipping on Starveling’s clothes, Peter cracked the door open, sliding out of the room. After, he heard the door locking behind him, the playlist volume turned up to its maximum. 

Greeting Peter on the other side, Snout looked up from the same spot on the couch he had held since the evening--the only difference now was the light and the presence of the rest of the company, all of whom joined him in staring in Peter’s direction. Flute had his arms crossed, looking a step more rugged than usual. He didn’t hesitate, speaking the moment the other emerged from the bathroom. “There’s no--Put some pants on, but--There’s no food, Peter.” Ah, he hadn’t had any coffee. He was one of those people.

“So, run to the store,” Peter replied. With inching steps, he made his way from one end of the living room to the other, pausing to have the rest of the conversation by the stairs, where he apparently felt less exposed.

“Actually, we did a Nose Goes type thing, and since we couldn’t find you and tell you about it, you  _ technically _ lost.” Flute couldn’t hide how he found himself funny. “And it’s  _ your  _ car, anyway, so we figured…”

“--We figured we could read over your script while you were out,” Snout cut in.

“Assuming you got it done,” Snug added.

If it was possible, Peter grew more defensive than before. He held the laptop at his chest now. “I have...a draft. But it’s not edited.”

“So, we read and edit it,” Flute responded. 

As he took a step forward, Peter took a step back, moving up the stairs. “No one needs to read it,” he said.

“The actors do.”

Fittingly, Bottom came up from behind, intending only on brushing Peter as he passed, instead having to grab hold of him to keep him from stumbling. “Are we reading the script? Can I read it?” he asked.

Peter was stone in a doughy grip, shoulders locked into position from where they were beneath Bottom’s hands. If not for the computer, Peter might’ve fallen completely slack. “It’s just a first draft,” he repeated. 

Among the three of the company still standing in the living, someone’s stomach growled, and shortly thereafter, Flute grew merciless. “Bottom,” he said, stone-faced, “Get the computer.”

It was not only the combination of his size (a fraction taller than anyone in the company) and his stupidity (a fraction slower than anyone in the company) that made Bottom an effective brand of human muscle, but his ability to turn Peter inanimate at the touch. Dangerous as it was to lift him midway up the stairs, Peter went into a state of red-faced paralysis. Whether he wanted it or not, his face pressed into Bottom’s chest, and his words were caught in his throat until he was delivered to the first floor again and his laptop was wrenched away from him. He looked Flute dead in the face and spat whatever he could manage. “Fuck you, Francis.”

“Have fun at the store,” Flute responded. “You can take Bottom.”

“I don’t  _ want  _ to take Bottom--” Peter held fast to a handful of shirt fabric before he looked upward and remembered whose it was. “--No offense,” he muttered for decorum’s sake. It occurred to him that, at the rate he was going, the bet was a lot cause, and he might need to change his approach. Fortunately, Bottom’s fingers holding fast around his bare thighs, even if it was necessary to hold him, had certain softening effects on Peter which he hated and enjoyed in equal measure. If only because it was necessary, he corrected himself. “I mean. I’m sure you want to stay and read it, too.”

“But you’ll need his help to carry the groceries,” Flute insisted. He’d seen his opportunity to rid himself of Bottom’s company, and he wasn’t willing to let it pass him by. “And Bottom’s the strongest. He’s the best man for the job.” 

Bottom’s will was entirely lost in a sea of his ego, once inflated. “I am  _ pretty  _ strong,” he said, already holding Peter as his ready-made example.

Although late in its arrival, Peter felt the beginnings of the day’s migraine, fed by the smile and wave of Flute in the doorway as he climbed into the car. He’d made Bottom carry him up the stairs, and he’d taken his time picking an outfit good enough to hide the half-hardness begotten from his own humiliation, but his suffering was hardly something he could wait out. He stole a hoodie from Bottom’s things, saying nothing on the matter aside from the fact that he was cold. Beyond that, he was silent, reminding himself periodically on the road that it wasn’t good to keep a clenched jaw. He squeezed the steering wheel in replacement, focusing more on the increasing pain and the growing number of spots in his vision. The forest in the early morning didn’t suit him, shifting from an already ill-fitted pink sky to the spots of blue visible through the trees. He almost prefered the atmosphere of the roads at night, as they at least gave him an excuse to uphold the existing tension, and once there was a breech in the foliage, the morning sun only hurt him further. It gleamed off of the brilliant green of an approaching road sign, at which Bottom felt the need to point to create a cocktail of pulsing damage in Peter’s temples. He swerved into the other lane, hand on his forehead. “We should turn here,” Bottom shouted, or, at least, it sounded like shouting. 

Peter looked to the mirror, but the sign was already passed. “Why?”

“Just trust me!”

“ _ Why _ ?” Peter asked again, turning anyway. The car slowed as he followed Bottom’s index finger to the building coming up over the horizon. On the backdrop of a clear sky and a cluster of power lines, he saw the blue, gable roof and the accompanying few cars in an otherwise empty parking lot. He looked back at Bottom, who smiled at him as they pulled in.

“I figured we could get breakfast,” he said.

Peter yanked the keys from the ignition, his view of the sign above them partially obscured by the onslaught of stars in his vision. The printed acronym for the International House of Pancakes stared back at him. 

“Since it’s just us.” Bottom placed a hand on Peter’s shoulder, oblivious to what it was doing. Its warmth alone, while sickeningly platonic, drew Peter all the way out of the car, because some broken part of his brain was entirely convinced that more touches were to follow if he obliged. He had a bet to win.

It seemed that the lights inside nearly rivaled the rising sun in terms of their intensity, and once seated, Peter rested his head on the table to shield himself. Whatever part of him had decided this was all going to be worth it was weakening. Bottom read parts of the menu aloud, searching for a reaction to any of them. “You don’t have to get pancakes if you don’t like them. I think they have crepes--oh, Peter! Bananas foster french toast! That sounds kinda good, right?”

“Can you please stop shouting?” Peter groaned; it sounded like shouting.

Bottom leaned over the tabletop, lowering his voice. “Are you okay?”

“Fine.”

“Are you sure, because--,” he paused, handing his menu off to the waitress and ordering for the both of them. “--Because I’m kinda getting the vibe you’re not feeling so good.”

Telling Bottom to fuck off didn’t align with the needs of the bet, and it wasn’t a feat Peter could manage as he was. He hid his face in his arms, peering briefly over them to the other’s face, inches away. To add to his list of urges, there was a new duo of additions: either to shove the man back or to pull him forward in something a little less tender than a kiss. Headache pounding again, he serviced neither, and when the waitress came back around, he lost the area he’d been using as a pillow to an omelette and bananas foster french toast. Bottom picked at the latter, insisting through a mouthful that it was pretty good and that Peter should try some. He drove a second fork into it, winding it through a generous piece of every ingredient on the plate before holding it out. “Seriously, try it,” he said.

Peter held his mouth open, and he waited for an uncomfortably long time for the subsequent airplane, realizing halfway through a misplaced ‘ah’ that he’d forgotten himself again. The fork was clearly meant to be taken. Airplane who. Under a new blanket of awkwardness, Bottom pressed onward, committing to the airplane bit just as Peter backed away from it, wrenching the fork out of his hand and stumbling through an emphasis on how he was clearly kidding. The immediate compliance and the lack of equal embarrassment in Bottom’s face infuriated him into chewing with an unnecessary vigor. “It’s not that good,” he replied, not entirely lying; he didn’t have much of an appetite to begin with, and the moment he swallowed, his stomach told him he was making a mistake. As if that was the only mistake he’d made today. He kept eating.

“You don’t like sweet things, Peter?”

Looking up from his omelette, Peter shook his head. The egg was giving him a similar feeling of unpleasantness, as if emphasizing that eating, in general, was a bad idea. Even a drink of water disagreed with him. “Salty stuff,” he said, dead-eyed. “I like salty stuff.”

A glimmer of understanding played in Bottom’s face, and he swallowed, nodded and took a drink. “I think I could eat just about anything,” he replied. 

They made deadly eye contact with one another. Again, Peter experienced a whole collection of urges--sexual, aggressive, sexually aggressive. He set his fork down, headache resurfacing. He slid out of his seat. The urge to vomit.

Despite how long he’d spent in the bathroom, how he’d stumbled out and how he’d consistently had his hands pressed against his temples, Peter still climbed into the driver’s seat afterward. The door was open with Bottom beside it, asking for the third time if he was alright, but he kept his eyes trained on the side of the building in front of him, vision dipping in and out in the fashion of fireworks bursting inside his skull. Pain, then the disrupting, colorless sprinkle of stars. It was only after watching him struggle with getting his seatbelt on when Bottom changed to a new question, reaching in to lift the other out of his seat. “Do you want me to drive?” he asked, helping Peter’s arms into position around his neck before pulling him out of the car.

“I didn’t know you had a license,” Peter groaned.  _ Because it goes against my image of how incompetent you are as a person _ , he thought, pressing his face into Bottom’s chest. He clung to him a bit longer as he was lowered into the passenger’s seat. As hard as he was trying to prevent it, his eyes watered.

Bottom asked a fourth time, “Are you alright?” But it was different, because now his voice was lower and his face was closer. It didn’t make him any less annoying, and it didn’t do anything to curb a migraine, but Peter closed the gap, kissing him and wishing it would. He slid his tongue along Bottom’s lips until they parted, trying to escape the terrible taste in his own mouth. With some effort, he kept Bottom from pulling away, unsure what to do once the moment came where their eyes met and they had to look at each other again. As if it was even a small percentage of an upside, it was the first time Bottom had appeared slightly disoriented. Peter squeezed him at the cheeks, memorizing the configuration. 

“Uh.” Bottom backed up a step, reaching blindly for the door. He moved to the driver’s side without shutting it, and he sat still in his seat for a minute afterward as if he was trying to remember what was going on. Fingers finding a keyless ignition, he finally turned to Peter. “Are we still going to the store?” 

“We can go wherever you want.”

“Like...to Whole Foods or…Trader Joe’s. Or the GPS is already set to Walmart, I think, so.”

Peter found the keys in his pocket, leaning over to put them in himself. Over the rush of the engine coming to life, he took Bottom’s face back in his hands, soft but uneven under Peter’s palms. Warm, increasingly so.

Bottom made some effort to look away, but was ultimately prevented. He pushed words out like pressing piano ivories one at a time, unsure. “So, do you, uh...Do you like me?”

A hammer on a bell, a plate shattering against the floor, a car door slamming--Peter’s migraine came back in full force, pushing against the casing of his skull so hard he wondered if it might break apart. Below, like a bat being drawn suddenly across his stomach, he felt the need to vomit again, but he suppressed it. He returned to his thoughts about his bet and how he planned to win it. Through another round of blindness, he pulled Bottom forward, their teeth clicking uncomfortably together in something a little closer to Peter’s ideal. After carrying on for longer than before, he finally pulled away, and with not so much as an inch between them, he lied.


	6. In the Hallway

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Peter Quince and the rest of his newly christened band of actors would love nothing more than to leave the past behind them, the past is swift, stupid and unavoidable. Yet, as cruel as it is, Peter strives to make the best of a bad situation.

Crossing from one side of the cracked asphalt to the other, even stepping out of the comfortable embrace of the air conditioning had put Peter in a bad mood. The grass on either side was shriveled into yellow confetti with no hope of salvation from the weak couple of sprinklers scattered from lawn to lawn. They were on their last legs, dripping pitifully on wilted gardens and dirt patches as the neighborhood oversaw a wider stretch of drought-touched wasteland. Peter pulled at the collar of his shirt before it really stuck to him, and as hard as he tried to avoid it, his mother squeezed his hand, wringing the sweat out of it like juice out of an orange. She pulled him up a collection of cement steps, whispering that he better straighten his back before anyone came to answer the door. He whispered back that he’d rather just stay at home, that he was in the middle of a game and that he didn’t see why he had to come in the first place. Before she could begin to scold him, the door cracked open, and Peter felt something worse than the heat on his back as Bottom smiled at him from over the threshold.

They were twelve.

Peter pulled at his collar again, unbuttoning the top button the moment his mother’s attention was diverted to the crowd of other mothers in the kitchen archway waiting to receive her. While all the stucco on the outside was the same, the interior of Bottom’s home was like a prison of wallpaper and running fans, and the kitchen soon disappeared beyond an entire wall of old family photos, which Peter gave a fleeting glance to rather than engaging Bottom in the conversation he was trying so hard to start. It was a collage of old and new, ugly photos in intricate frames, some sepia, some just poorly taken. Beneath them, there was a table set with a number of unlit candles, giving Peter the impression that all the people he was looking at were deceased, or that it was another poor decorating choice. As the eyes of an old man pictured next to a cactus followed him down the hallway, Peter hoped it was the latter. He turned away, catching the last of whatever Bottom was saying to him. “Glad you could make it, by the way. I was worried, because the other guys were kinda busy. That’s what their moms said, I guess.” He was trying to talk over his shoulder and navigate the way to his bedroom at the same time, and it wasn’t working.

“So, no one else is here?” Peter asked, remembering all the names and faces of the boys in the neighborhood and feeling betrayed but not surprised.

Bottom shrugged. “Yeah, I thought it was kinda weird. Like, everybody’s busy--what are the odds, you know?”

“I mean, no one really wants to go to block party when it’s a million degrees outside.”

“Which is why we moved it to inside?” Another shrug, and Bottom extended an arm, leading the way into his bedroom, as if the grand reveal was going to be anything more than an ugly green paint job covered up by an abundance of movie posters. Apart from the bed, it was claustrophobic, with one corner being dedicated to the closet and the other to an old box of a TV, and the shelf of books and games beneath it. Dropping to his knees, Bottom moved some of the books aside, uncovering a first and second controller tangled but still connected to a Gamecube stuffed toward the back. After pulling the controllers apart to the best of his ability, he handed one off to Peter and began moving old playbills to the floor so he could properly read through what he had that was worth playing. “What kind of games do you like?” Bottom asked, picking titles to look over before putting them back.

Peter turned the controller over in his hands, mildly relieved that it didn’t happen to be sticky like he predicted. “I don’t care,” he said, which was at the same time the truth and his way of hiding the fact that he didn’t play anything. He wondered how far he could fake it and decided that, because it was Bottom, it didn’t matter.

But by the time the disc was in and Peter had lowered into a sitting position he realized it might, in fact, matter a lot that he was better at whatever game this was. For the sake of being better at it than Bottom. That mattered a lot.

Luckily, whatever Bottom had decided on (case laying open on the floor, colorful and clad in characters Peter didn’t recognize), they had narrowly avoided the realm of gritty war games Peter saw glimpses of at friends’ houses and family gatherings. Instead, the screen flashed between menus, and Bottom asked again how Peter felt about Nintendo (“It’s okay.”), then about Mario (“He’s okay.”) and finally about fighting games (“Okay.”). His brow creased as the game began and jumped straight into demanding a slew of choices out of him, and he looked over to see Bottom selecting a bunch of things with more purpose and understanding than Peter could reasonably fake. He tried, instead, to pretend he knew was doing by taking longer than intended and refusing to look Bottom in the face after he finished. “Prepare to lose,” he said, regretting it the moment the game began.

While Bottom was nowhere close to being excellent at what he’d selected for them, he was leagues beyond Peter in that he could properly interpret the instructions and controls that Peter refused to ask for again, ashamed to have forgotten a third time. His lip was permanently situated between his teeth, save for when he watched his character fall to the ground, KO’d, and his mouth dropped open in indignant disbelief. He was doing so poorly that, by the seventh round, Bottom noticed his vice grip on the controller and offered quietly that he might let Peter win a few. “No, it’s just that--,” Peter paused, clicking whatever he needed to jump, because jumping was almost what he wanted to do. It was almost punching. “--It’s that the timing doesn’t make any sense. And you got a better character, so it’s not fair.”

Overtop of the sound of them clicking buttons back and forth, and of the soft drone of the TV at low volume, the two of them could hear an eruption of laughter from the parents in the kitchen. Bottom winced as he watched Peter’s character jump one more time before killing him, It was a simple slip of the hand in reaction to the noise, but still to the ultimate effect of Peter turning just a shade darker in frustration. “It doesn’t make sense,” he repeated under his breath.

Bottom set his controller down, leaning over and reaching to place his hands atop Peter’s own. Though they exuded an excessive warmth, they weren’t as sweaty as usual, which was some kind of disgusting upside to a breech in Peter’s personal space. “It’s like this,” Bottom murmured, leading Peter in the very basics of gameplay. His face was very close to Peter’s own, and in the end, his words fell on deaf ears. It was difficult to listen when Peter felt gross. He felt as if he was trying to fit inside his own skin, and it was too difficult a thing to do when Bottom was touching him. He felt as if he was trying to fit inside his shirt, and he wanted Bottom to touch the skin beneath it, imagining how it might feel less irritating than the fabric, less hateful than his own hands from under his bedsheets when he dreamt of something that wasn’t necessarily scary, but that he was still afraid of. He wanted Bottom to touch him. That was hateful in and of itself. That was gross.

“You keep pictures of your mom in your room?”

Peter let the controller go, eyes wandering away from the two characters now idled on screen. He moved away to the only other available space on the floor, pulling at the corner of the photograph sitting on a box at the corner of the bed. A woman smiled back at him, face reminiscent of her kin but taut against the curves of her skull in divergence of a usual chubbiness. Bottom reached to fish it out of Peter’s hand only for him to hold it at a distance. “Not usually,” he tried to explain, still reaching, “But my abuelita’s letting me pick which picture to frame for when we hang it up, because we’ve got ones of her with, um. With hair and without.” He grew quiet, lowering his arm and looking to photograph that had been sitting beneath the first. The same woman.

“I didn’t know she died already.” Peter let his words slip out in their rawest form, following Bottom’s gaze to catch his change in expression, his eyes locking onto Peter’s own.

They were brown and a bit glassy, like the picture, and if anyone was paying attention, they might notice the similarities extended to the hair. When she still had hair. Bottom looked briefly as if he might address the bluntness before he let his eyes fall to the floor. He swallowed a large lump in his throat and nodded. “A couple weeks ago, yeah.”

“Was that the day you got that phone call during gym, and you went home early?”

“Yeah.”

“’Cause you needed to be there while she died or ‘cause she already died?”

“Uh. She…’cause she already died. Before I could get there.”

“That sucks.”

He looked up again, nodded again. Swallowed again, hard. His eyes were dark and wet, like the disturbed ripple of a dirty pond, like the eyes of someone who was leaking all the words he was taking in, because they hurt him. “Yeah.”

Like the smile of the woman was genuine in both photos, and it hurt him. Peter released the one he was holding, and with it, his discomfort had seemed to move off of himself, hanging like a big, ugly chandelier in the room now and sucking all the air from Bottom’s lungs instead of his own. It was large and looming and dark, and Peter leaned back against the TV to watch the shadow of it settle on Bottom’s soft face.

“I heard cancer’s pretty brutal and stuff. Like, you’re in a lot of pain the whole time.”

More swallowing. More nodding. Bottom picked his mother’s picture up with trembling fingers that were trying not to tremble. Failing. “Uh. Yeah.”

“Was it hard to get used to her just not having any hair?”

“Yeah. Um. It.” His face was scrunching up, try as he might to prevent it, his words caught somewhere in the twist of his mouth as it tried to avoid the ugliness of the inevitable frown. It wasn’t anything like the gentle curve of a cartoon. It hardly looked like a frown. It looked like Bottom was trying desperately to holding something in. He was trying to swallow again, to wipe his eyes before anything escaped.

Peter’s fingers slid along the carpet, and he stared, knowing he had that power to push it a step further. It set his pulse on a wild path through him, hitting hard in his fingertips as they crawled to the edge of Bottom’s hand. After a moment’s hesitation, he laced their fingers together and was met immediately with the shuddering breaths of Bottom beginning to cry, squeezing Peter’s hand with every heave inward. It was warmer than before, or Peter was matching its warmth with his own as he anticipated another squeeze. It wasn’t long before he felt gross again and had to stand.

He stepped out of the room with some mention of the restroom, if only to stand a foot away from the doorway and listen to Bottom, still crying. The sound was unique in that it distracted from Peter’s heart in his chest, where it felt abnormal despite the fact that that was where it truly belonged. Peter felt for it, tracking how it pounded with the noise and how it slowed the longer he stood still with his other hand on the doorknob. Like being hollowed out. Which was better than the grossness. He waited for Bottom to quiet down, and, having lost what he gained by standing there, he turned his attention toward the other end of the hallway.

While it was midday and the light from the outside even affected these deeper reaches of the house, Peter moved again past the pictures on the wall, easily comparing the space to any hallway in the middle of the night, largely in the present feeling of the following eyes of the portraits he passed. At a halfway point, he could no longer hear Bottom over the sound of the women in the kitchen enjoying themselves, and feeling empty--not knowing where the bathroom was anyway--he approached the latter noise.

In the doorway, a gaggle of mothers gave Peter a fleeting glance before the oldest of them set her drink down and rounded the counter to get a better look at him. She had at least thirty years on the rest of them, her flesh creased and broken but her eyes soft and ferocious. Dark and glassy. Peter recognized them, and before the woman could speak, Peter’s own mother seemed to remember him. “What is it, Petey?”

Peter wondered if this older woman was anything close to what he knew. He stared at her, hands at his sides. “I was wondering if there were any drinks.”

The woman’s head snapped immediately to catch Peter’s mother processing the request, regurgitating it at a slower pace with a visible pantomime to go along with the concept of needing a drink.Then, a fire was stoked in the woman’s face, and Peter was positive she had to at least be similar. Under eyebrows raised up to the highest creases in her forehead, she crossed her arms tightly over her chest, looking up to the ceiling as she shouted. “ _Nicolás!_ ”

The name reverberated through the house’s tacky interior, initially lost on Peter until Bottom appeared behind him to remind him in presence alone that he had a first name and that was it. He had hurriedly tried to hide the evidence that he’d been crying, though he sniffed and moved into the kitchen with red eyes. Against Peter’s expectations, the woman stood stock-still, ignorant of it, or uncaring. In place of comforting words, she said something quick and biting in spanish, to which Bottom rung at his shirt and seemed to cower. He repeated certain words under his breath before squinting at Peter over his shoulder, where he seemed to gain an understanding. In response, he offered some slow, broken spanish of his own.

The woman--his grandmother, more than likely, and less than likely a woman who could actually speak english--spat back with a lecture Bottom could only keep up with in its intensity. He cut in weakly with the sentiment that he didn’t understand and that he was sorry (spanish as far as he could manage) before they grew tired of each other and the woman moved on to her next line of business. From the fridge, she found bottles of juice which she deposited directly into Peter’s arms, and from the cupboard, she produced a glass case from which she transferred several pastries onto a plate, shoving that in Peter’s hands as well. “For you boys,” she said with some effort and a bitter glance toward her grandson.

Peter nodded, backing out of the room before he could truly recognize his situation and become embarrassed by it. Away from prying eyes, he passed the plate off so he wouldn’t have to hold it, quirking an eyebrow at the sudden reluctance on Bottom’s part to take it. The hallway wasn’t dark, but a shadow suspended itself over them on their second pass by the wall of photos, where they stopped. Bottom looked as if he wanted to say something, or maybe his mouth was opening and closing because he was incapable of breathing through his nose. He tried until Peter interrupted him. “You’re lucky no one else could come,” he said, trying and failing to twist the cap off of his drink. “They would have made fun of you for crying.”

“Thanks.”

Peter looked up from the bottle.

“For coming over, I mean.”

He expected Bottom to start crying again and considered reaching for his hand, to take it and tangle their fingers together like before. Here, of all places, he knew no one was likely to see. But their hands were full.

“Your grandma’s kind of a bitch,” he replied.


	7. Nick Bottom is Far From the Ideal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Peter Quince and the rest of his newly christened band of actors would love nothing more than to leave the past behind them, the past is swift, stupid and unavoidable. Yet, as cruel as it is, Peter strives to make the best of a bad situation.

The cabin was quiet, which was the problem. From the kitchen, Bottom crept among the bags deposited haphazardly on the floor, putting the cold foods in the fridge and the dry foods in a pile on the counter. He waited for some instruction from Peter on where to put things, having watched the man release his bags the moment he stepped in the door to the silence that had been waiting for them, irritation building on his face the way it seemed to do so naturally. With a wave of the hand, he gave Bottom a noncommittal response, more concerned with the heavy silence, and, finding that he had been unable to properly look Peter in the face since their moment in the IHOP parking lot, Bottom found that it was enough, that he would have to proceed with something noncommittal. He put a drink in the fridge only to take it right back out, and he looked for Peter out the window. It would remain quiet--at least, from where he was standing.

From where Flute was sitting--in the hot tub, yanked suddenly from the clutches of his own drowsiness--it was growing steadily louder. He cracked an eye open, sighing and sinking lower into the water to escape Peter standing at the tub’s edge, hands on his hips and scowl on his face. He raised his voice over the sound of the churning water. “I thought you guys were going to rehearse while we were gone.”

Flute sunk lower still. He took advantage of the small stature of his director, glancing past him to Bottom in the kitchen. “So, I take it you and Bottom didn’t fuck in the car, then?” he muttered before his mouth dipped under the water. Out of courteousness, he closed his eyes before Peter’s inevitable blush.

“No. You aren’t listening. Did you even read the script? Where is everyone? Francis?”

A breeze curled around Flute’s arm as he raised it out of the water. “Slow your roll,” he said, waving Peter off. “I was getting there.”

“But…?”

“But we  _ paid _ to rent this place. We have the weekend. And Snout wanted to go hiking and look for cryptids, or something like that.”

“Cryptids.”

“Or ghosts or something. I wasn’t listening. The point is, they’re all taking a walk.”

“What about rehearsal?”

Flute reopened one eye and sighed. “If you want to rehearse, I’ll rehearse. But I’m not going to get them. This is too goddamn comfortable. If Ass-Face still needs his v-card punched, I seriously recommend--”

“ _ Not now. _ ”

Giggling, Flute sunk low enough to be as close as he could get to laying in the hot tub as if it were a bed, settling back so that a jet of water pressed against the curve of his spine. “Bottom!” he called, watching for the man through the kitchen window and smiling once he appeared out on the deck. “Bottom, you know where the hiking trail around here is, right?” Bottom nodded, and, like a light switch, he triggered Peter’s headache again. Or maybe it was Flute’s steady smile that was doing it, bobbing in and out of sight from beneath the swirl of water. Flute felt the breeze again with another dismissive gesture. “So then, you guys can go for a little walk and find the others, and we can have a nice, evening rehearsal when you get back. Sound good?”

“That sounds great,” Bottom replied, as if anyone was talking to him. He tried to look at Peter, whose mouth had been half-open to reply on its own. But that was his mouth. Eye-contact was still a distant concept.

Peter’s eyes were steely and dry and full of disdain. They aimed daggers at Flute, waving from the hot tub and shrinking into the distance as he watched Peter’s descent into the woods, his failure to walk either in front of or behind Bottom, who was determined to match his pace. Peter’s eyes were already tired from the prickling pain of the migraine around them. However, removing him from his settling state of lethargy, he felt Bottom’s knuckles brush against his own, and, perhaps a little quickly, he withdrew his hand to hide in the pocket of his hoodie. His head snapped upward. Bottom mirrored him, hands in pockets. “Sorry. I didn’t know if you wanted to...uh…,” he trailed off.

“To what?”

Bottom shrugged, but they both knew.  _ To hold my hand because you said you liked me and kissed me in the IHOP parking lot. _ He tried to look again, catching the side of Peter’s face and wondering if it was just as warm as his own. “Nothing. You, uh. You look kinda nervous.”

It was like purgatory. Peter kept a constant scan on the treeline, finding that at some point he had lost visibility of the cabin in the distance. The serenity of the sunlight dipping down through the expanse of this particular section of greenery was lost on him, because it didn’t matter what time of day it was, he still detested it. He stared straight at Bottom and thought of the events of the summer. “I just hate nature,” Peter said, regretting it in the same vein as all of the day’s decisions. His fingers squirmed in his pocket before he opted to hold them himself.

“What’s there to hate?”

Peter scowled as if he’d been personally offended. “It’s creepy. It’s like I’m being watched out here or something, and ever since last summer--,” he stopped himself, mind racing to an immediate change of subject despite the fact that he’d already caught the light in Bottom’s eyes. “--Anyway, the outdoors in general around here aren’t my favorite. It’s too goddamn hot, and the landscape sucks. I feel like I’m walking down into hell or something, it’s so fucking steep,” as he said so, Peter tripped, unwilling to take his hands out of his pockets and opting instead to tumble straight to the forest floor. However, his knees stopped just short of the dirt path, and he looked up from where he was sure he was about to fall to find Bottom’s hand curled in his hood, suspending him.

“You’re super light.” Bottom pulled Peter to his feet, taking him by the shoulders to keep him upright. “Or you’re lucky I’m such a strong guy! That’s gotta be the kind of thing you like about me, right?”

“No.” Peter blushed, remembering himself the second after he spoke his mind. He wished Bottom would hold him a little tighter to make it easier to lie. “I mean. Not that, specifically,” he said.

There it was; Bottom squeezed. “So, uh. What do you like, then?” 

It wasn’t enough. Peter needed it tighter if he was going to come up with anything believable. He leaned back, head against Bottom’s chest, hesitating. “...What’s not to like?” he murmured, and, before his tone betrayed him, he twisted, lips pressing down against whatever corner of Bottom’s mouth he could find without thinking too hard about it. He pushed a prayer into the other’s lips--something urging him to drop the topic where it was.

Like purgatory, they were still for a moment in the middle of the path, and it was quiet again until the air seemed to even out and the ambience of the forest leaked, piecemeal, into its full symphony of sounds.  Among it all, a twig snapped, and Peter pushed his weight further into Bottom than it was already. “Did you hear that?” he hissed, determined to bury the chill in his spine beneath Bottom’s natural body heat.

“The random forest noises...?”

Peter pulled at Bottom’s shirt fabric just shy of tearing into it. “ _ No _ . I mean, there’s something  _ out there _ , it sounds like.” He scanned the treeline before looking back to Bottom and confirming that his face hadn’t changed at all from what it was. No, he was smiling now. Squeezing. Almost hard enough.

“You’re just trying to scare me, just like the woods last summer,” Bottom mumbled. He smiled as if Peter was making some effort to be endearing.

“I’m not, and I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about our summer rehearsals.”

“Well, stop.”

Another squeeze. Almost as if Bottom knew how effective it was, but he wasn’t smart enough for that to be true. “Why don’t you guys want to talk about the summer? I want to talk about it,” he said.

“And I don’t,” Peter replied, pushing off of him. 

“But it was weird, you know!” Bottom took a step forward, Peter took a step back. “Agree that it was weird!”

Shaking his head, Peter took an extra step, catching himself on a tree branch to avoid another fall. “Of course it was weird. That’s why I don’t want to talk about it. It was a weird mass hallucination, and I’d prefer to leave it in the past where it belongs.”

Bottom took an extra step of his own. “But that’s the thing! I don’t think it was a hallucination or anything. I think it was real life.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Peter spat. He held onto the tree for dear life. “No way. There’s no way something like that can really happen in real life, got it?”

“But, I’m saying--”

Another squeeze, sudden and tight, and it took Peter a moment to recognize Bottom’s arms were still at his sides, unable to supply the pressure around Peter’s shoulders. Somewhere in the ambiance, another twig had snapped. A layer of sweat formed on Peter’s forehead. Before he could see what was behind him, it shouted in his ear, and he shouted back, although he was louder, and absolutely terrified. He undid all the space between him and Bottom in a single stumble, latching back onto the other, not for anything that he could provide, but for...something. Maybe for the single shake it took from Bottom to get Peter to stop screaming and pay attention to what had actually grabbed him. As if to spit in the face of an earlier effort, he fell to his knees into the dirt, one hand on his chest and the other on Bottom’s pant leg.

“Jesus, dude, are you crying? It was a joke.”

Snug stood with his hands still held upright, slouching forward against the natural incline of the hiking path. He brought a hand down against the tree trunk Peter had previously clung to, and though the idea of it being a joke had come out of his mouth, he didn’t look entirely amused with himself. Instead, he watched Peter sink down, expression leaning more toward being blas é than anything else .

“It wasn’t fucking funny,” Peter cried, and it was the way he dragged Bottom down with him to hold onto that finally wrestled out a bit of Snug’s laughter.

“What are you so scared about? It's the middle of day,” Snug snorted.

“He's scared of the woods,” said Bottom.

“I never said that. Don't tell him that,” said Peter. He was an inch away from shamelessly burying his face into the man’s chest. Had they…

Snug pointed. “Did you guys do it already?”

“Do what?”

From Bottom’s typical naivety there wasn’t nearly as much context as Peter’s need to back a solid twenty inches away. Snug snorted again. “Sorry I asked,” he said, not sorry at all.

Peter blushed and pushed himself to his feet, ready to change the subject. “It's about time we stop wandering around out in the wilderness and rehearse like we said we were going to.”

“Meaning that it's time to tear Tom away from the thing he found,” Snug sighed, looking back down the path, down to where the trees grew thick and dark, like an impassable wall.

Peter felt another chill. “Thing?” he repeated.

Snug pushed his glasses up his nose and nodded. He started down the path in nonchalance, beckoning Peter along with a tilt of his head. “Don't look so pale,” he said.“It's really stupid.”

Nothing took the illusion of enigma out of the forest quite like the way Snug pulled his feet through the leaves, kicked rocks out of his way and crushed smaller plants beneath the soles of his shoes. At the time the path grew too steep and merged into a set of aged wooden steps, he skipped two at a time. Toward the bottom, he looked back over his shoulder, and, noticing the significant lead he’d gained on his company, he slowed to a stop beside an old trunk which made him appear miniscule in standing beside it. He was like a miniature person once the earth flattened out due to the nature of every tree that sat there; they grew so tall and wide it was if they were something that formed in the sky and came downward, or that the space between them had to have been carved to separate the massive cylinders of bark. Snug’s voice, too, seemed to shrink in the space, but he made no effort to raise it. Once he had decided Peter and Bottom were sufficiently caught up, he made a sharp turn off the path, following a line of trampled foliage he had carved for himself earlier in the day. He came to a log (merely a fallen branch from one of the behemoth trees above), ducking under it and disappearing over the mossy precipice on the other side.

Reluctantly, Peter approached the log and peered over it himself, judging a distance that seemed all the greater with Snug standing below for the estimate. Sweat pooled on Peter’s forehead, and he reached back for Bottom, grabbing at his shirt as had quickly become a habit. “You first,” he whispered, moving aside to watch Bottom slide casually over the edge. 

Compared to Snug, Bottom made the drop look like one gentle step, and when he hit the lower level, he looked back upward, reaching to pull Peter down like a box off of a shelf. He still wasn’t squeezing as hard as Peter thought he should, but at this point, Peter was beginning to suspect that his ideals had seriously diverged from what Bottom was actually capable of, even when supporting Peter’s full weight against his chest. Dissatisfying on another level, Bottom was quick to set Peter down afterward, though it wouldn’t have suited them to continue the action with Snug waiting impatiently for them to continue following after him, over a small stream and around the colossal curves of redwoods which extended ad infinitum into the haze of the more distant wood. 

Finally, where the growth from the ground was the densest, Snout could be heard in the distance, over the sound of miscellaneous birds and the like. Snug guided his party around a whole fallen tree and a stack of stones up against it to where the sound originated, where Starveling sat on a sizeable rock overlooking the source of what had been and was currently Snout’s source of excitement: at his feet--rather, around his feet--there was a ring of mushrooms, some linked together and overgrown, but a circle all the same, six feet across. Snug leaned against the nearest tree trunk, hands digging into his pockets, and Peter must have audibly sighed, because he looked up from the ground, nodding in complete agreement. “I told you it was stupid,” he said.

Snout looked up from his phone after one more of several of the same photograph. “It is not,” he said indignantly, stepping out of the circle to get it from another angle. “Peter, do you know what this is?”

The words felt a bit like the first taste of cheap vodka, and Peter frowned as he said them. “A fairy ring.”

“ _ Right _ ?”

Peter pinched at the bridge of his nose. His migraine had been too long absent, meaning that it was now back in its most powerful form. “It’s mushrooms, Tom. What’s your point? We have rehearsing to do.” At his side, Bottom had crouched down to take a picture of his own, and it took a great deal to suppress the urge to kick him.

“Okay, Peter, I know you don’t like talking about this, but--,” Snout tucked his phone away in his back pocket, glancing briefly at Starveling and Snug, who refused to look back at him, “--I’ve been looking into the connections between our shared experiences from over the summer in correlation with paranormal activity, and I think this is a good bit of evidence.”

“It’s not paranormal, it’s caused by fungi in the soil,” Snug cut in, already pulling up the page he’d found on Google.

“Okay, but you have to have rain to have mushrooms, and there hasn’t been any rain, so I’m saying--”

“They don’t need rain, Tom, they just grow more commonly in cool, damp environments, and in the deep weeds it isn’t exactly phenomena, it’s just nature--”

“It’s not damp, though! And it’s too dry for them to sufficiently grow in a big circle like this unless there was some other supernatural--”

“You don’t know how long these have been growing! Maybe years!”

“They would have dried out and died by then! And you can’t definitively say there was no supernatural involvement!”

“Fairies did not make this mushroom circle, you asshole. I don’t care what your Discord chat is telling you.”

The two of them kept arguing as if the well of their fundamental differences ran deeper than what was now only showing on the surface. Starveling looked as if he’d been aged by this, a second version of an earlier, similar argument. He climbed down from his rock and shuffled to Peter’s side, ready to leave even if it meant leaving the others behind. “They said we were just going on a hike, and then before I could turn back, Snout announced that this trip might be a good opportunity to look into what happened last summer.” 

“It’s  _ definitely  _ not,” Peter said suddenly, loudly and so full of anger that he surprised himself. He had caught everyone’s attention, but Snout’s was the only one he pursued. “We’re here to rehearse. Nothing happened last summer, which means nothing needs to be proved during this rehearsal either, got it?”

Snout instantly deflated, taking one last look at the circle with a dying insistence. In his eyes, he pled for something unusual to happen, but a minute passed and nothing did. On the journey back to the cabin, he moved stubbornly at the back of a line with Snug at the front, prevented from truly dragging his feet for fear he might get lost. Ahead of him, Peter feared the same, head pivoting anxiously from side to side as the sun set beyond the furthest treeline. He had no judge of how close they were to the cabin yet, and the worst parts of him imagined the same setting at night. Inside the pocket of his hoodie, his fingers curled inward, and he thought briefly of Bottom, still at his side. His hand began to snake out into the open, fingers uncurling to clasp onto the ones hanging at rest just within his reach. It took only a second of pause for Peter to stop himself. A second, and Bottom finding the silence too unbearable, choosing instead to fill it with a less-than-interesting story about himself. For the sake of the bet, he pretended as if he hadn’t heard it before, though he wasn’t sure anymore if that sort of thing would get him any closer to what he needed. Bottom couldn’t even squeeze him that hard. 

Bottom couldn't even look at him.


	8. On the Roof

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Peter Quince and the rest of his newly christened band of actors would love nothing more than to leave the past behind them, the past is swift, stupid and unavoidable. Yet, as cruel as it is, Peter strives to make the best of a bad situation.

The door slammed shut, and after a stampede of footsteps echoing like thunder from the stairwell, Peter uncoiled from the ball he’d been reduced to, crawling out from his hiding place into the open air. For the altitude, the breeze was shockingly calm, and for what had previously transpired, it was quiet. Though a tentative look around served to prove they were alone, Peter was hesitant. He searched the rooftop for anyone else, any vague outline of a person, and even when he decided they were alone, he still felt his heart in his chest from being interrupted in the minutes prior. He pushed off against the cement at his fingertips, lifting his knees from the ground until he was standing. From there, he could see over the ledge, and his legs began to shake involuntarily as the ground came drifting into view. Forcing his eyes away from it, he pushed words out like their own isolated puffs of breath, because without a considerable effort, the words wouldn’t come. “Are you going to jump or not?”

They were thirteen.

Bottom looked up from over the guardrail, troubled in the split second before his face returned to its usual, chubby configuration. He shook his head, extending an index finger over the edge and pointing with indiscriminate confidence. “They threw my dance shoes off! And I can’t even see ‘em from here! Those--those--,” the words caught in Bottom’s throat as he inhaled, balling his hands into a pair of fists entirely foreign to his established temperament. Peter watched and waited for the rest of the sentence, for the common explicative that littered the halls of middle school and beyond. The kind of thing the high schoolers yelled at you if you got too close to them on the bus. Bottom’s lips parted. “--They’re so mean! What the heck! I mean, like, seriously! Seriously!”

Like watching surrealist performance art or looking at the view in front of him through a warped, glass panel, Peter had to check for the ground beneath his feet before Bottom grew any more frustrated, because he’d never seen Bottom grow frustrated. He’d been living with the juvenile assumption that it was beyond the boy’s emotional capability. Everything that day had a similar impression on him, like something wrong and far away. It was best, he decided, to react as he normally did. With malice. “What, are you going to cry about it?” As far as emotional capability went, it had been malice for a long time.

“No, just--,” Bottom heaved, glancing back over the building’s edge as if the ground below them had changed at all, but it was the same stretch of sidewalk and parking lot that had been there for three forgettable years; in that time, the pavement was just as fissured, the grass just as dry. Without a breeze, the oppressiveness of the heat on the rooftop was a new kind of unbearable, and after three years, Bottom had successfully grown his own handful of inches up and around, but that was all. He gripped the rail in his frustration, leaning out as far as he could with some consideration to his own safety. Then, he shouted again, mere noise before trickling into a loud grown, then into words. “They were expensive!” Then, mere noise again.

Peter winced. Somewhere in his chest, a sense of empathy was trying to crawl its way out, breaking through the precedent of a carefully crafted, thick layer of skin as if three years had really worn that much away, like rust or like acid. Like getting a scar above your eyebrow from a stupid injury or being too late to watch your mother die. Taking a deep breath inward, Peter pushed it all back down, but his chest hurt. “If you don’t cut that out, a teacher’s going to hear you. You’ll get suspended for being up here,” he managed.

“But it’s like, all of these guys aren’t even going to matter when I’m famous, but they matter right now because they suck!”

There it was--the breeze. It hurt less. “When you’re famous?” Peter scoffed.

Bottom looked over as if it was obvious. “Uh, duh.Yeah. After I graduate and stuff, I’m going to move to Hollywood and win an Oscar, and this is just going to be the story I tell about overcoming adversity,” he said.

“You’re going to move to Hollywood and immediately win an Oscar?”

“Well, I’m going to get cast in a bunch of stuff first. Like one of the Harry Potter movies or the next Star Wars prequel.”

Peter frowned. Or he’d been frowning constantly for three years. “You won’t make it in time for Star Wars. The next one’s probably already being filmed, and people don’t like them anyway, so they won’t make anymore. And who the hell are you going to play in Harry Potter?”

“A villain, maybe. One that hasn’t been introduced yet.”

“A villain?”

“Yeah, I think I’d make a really cool villain. Like with really cool clothes and powers and stuff.”

While he wasn’t trying very hard in the first place, Peter couldn’t picture it, and three years had taught him that meant it was time to drop the topic in its entirety. Today, he wanted to especially drop it, finding that he didn’t have the energy to keep going with the argument. Instead, he moved to sit, first flattening his palms against the rail and considering how it might feel beneath him as a seat, how he wasn’t all that afraid to perch himself casually on top of it, then drawing his hands back and sinking down with his back against the thin wall of the cement that separated him from the call of the void. He moved his backpack around to his front, resting it between his legs as Bottom took the cue to fall beside him. He said something, and Peter said something back, and then the breeze that had been lingering for a lump of minutes seemed to die away into a heat that better matched the oncoming ambience of the late afternoon. When the two had stopped speaking to each other, they were replaced by the chirp of the bugs in the unknowable distance, which was a near-constant song of scratch and buzz that need only a break in conversation to emerge in emphasis when the weather was so consistently stifling. Peter fished in his bag for his thermos and drank, though the water was warm. He hadn’t been listening, wiping the sweat from his hands onto his pant legs and staring at the impressions left in his palms by the cement, but Bottom was saying something again. He responded without taking in any particular word. “You’re not going to go get them?” He meant the shoes, and he didn’t feel the need to clarify.

Bottom sighed. “I’m tired. I’m ready for school to be over,” he whined, eyes squeezing shut in the sunlight.

Peter held the water out for him, studying the protruding veins in his own wrist before Bottom reached out, drinking whatever was left. “It’s not going to be any different in real life. Shitty kids just grow up into shitty adults,” Peter mumbled. He hugged his bag, hoping to shrink away from the excess of heat radiating off of Bottom in addition to whatever the sun had to offer but ultimately finding himself unsuccessful. Bottom’s shoulder against his own was something like an inferno that he didn’t have the energy to shy away from, and, having watched the last of the water slip past the other boy’s lips, he was newly uncomfortable, unsure what to do with himself.

“But I’ll be famous, so it won’t matter. That’s the difference,” Bottom said, dragging the back of his hand across his mouth.

“What if you’re not, though?”

Bottom shook his head. “I’m pretty sure I’m going to be famous.”

“Did your mom tell you that?”

It was quiet again; Peter had gotten very good at that, despite how it made his chest hurt worse. He decided he didn’t mind the pain, and he hugged his bag a bit tighter as Bottom thought up a weak response. “She told me I could be whatever I wanted,” he said, and then, he waited. As if he knew how Peter might continue. As if he was bracing himself. 

And when the moment didn’t come, he turned, finding Peter’s gaze lost to the trail of a plane passing overhead. His lips had moved briefly and soundlessly, and Bottom reached out, shaking him by the shoulder. “Peter?”

“I said, ‘That figures.’”


	9. Nick Bottom Fell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Peter Quince and the rest of his newly christened band of actors would love nothing more than to leave the past behind them, the past is swift, stupid and unavoidable. Yet, as cruel as it is, Peter strives to make the best of a bad situation.

While it had the same texture as a quickly spat lie, the fact that the script wasn’t ready was at least a partial truth. It could stand to be tweaked, the spelling checked and the characters built under a more solid foundation, and that was all Peter needed for his rapid retreat from a rehearsal that had him legitimately nauseated. Even though he had refrained from dinner as an added precaution, the effort it took him to corral Bottom without shouting sent him spiralling back into the realm of his migraine’s highest intensity. “We can try again tomorrow,” someone had said. One of them, before all their voices began to blend together from the repeated and soulless regurgitation of lines. It didn’t matter. Sometime during rehearsal, Peter accepted the dullness of his senses, and by the time he broke away to head up the stairs, looking up to the top step made his head swim. His stomach lurched as he took his first step, steadying only as he felt hands on his back. When he turned around, it lurched again--his gut reaction from seeing Bottom after hours of watching him ‘perform’.

“It felt good getting back in the swing of things, right?”

Peter gritted his teeth beneath the pounding hammer of the other’s voice, answering in a stiff whisper. “It’s a little overwhelming.” It felt involuntary, but he leaned backward, resting his head on Bottom’s chest. There was still the bet, which had quickly become an excuse for Peter to take a handful of shameless liberties. “I’m ready to go upstairs and relax,” he said with considerable emphasis.

After a single, well-placed stumble, Peter had Bottom’s arm cast gently around his shoulders as they ascended in tandem. As soon as his palm pressed into the bedspread upstairs, his whole body cried out for him to collapse there, but he was struck with a sense of bet-related duty as he watched Bottom move around to the other side of the room. “What are you doing?” he asked, so near groaning but not _quite_ there yet, so near tolerant of Bottom when he was facing the other way to grab something out of his bag.

When Bottom turned around, Peter was convinced he had moved into a realm of vivid hallucinations. After removing and replacing his contacts for his glasses, Bottom held up the book that had previously hung loosely in his right hand. “I figured I’d read a book or something,” he said. As if he read books or something. “Or, I guess it’s another script? I don’t know if it counts.”

It probably counted. Peter narrowed his eyes. “What script?”

The book was thin, blue and irritating to look at, if only because it was there, raising a possibility that hit Peter right in the temples, that some other theater production was just as tolerant as he was, if not more so. Bottom held it out for Peter to see as he fell into bed himself. “It’s this one I went to see a little bit ago, on my own. It’s like a bunch of, uh, like...Like, short stories? But together, like a montage, and it’s all about love and romance,” he said, smiling as he seemed to recall some part of it from long ago.

Peter ignored him in lieu of the title: _Almost, Maine_. He readjusted to peer into the pages as Bottom turned them, catching words and phrases that stabbed deeply at him as he grew silently envious of the contents, and in a regrettable minute of investment, he stopped Bottom from moving on in the script without him, changing position again until he could see everything clearly. He bit his lip. “Are you actually into this kind of stuff?” he asked, picking a part to read aloud. “‘So you’re just lookin’ for a place to see the northern lights.’”

“‘Yeah, just tonight,’” Bottom read back.

Peter shot him a look, but continued. “‘Well, you know, you might not see ‘em tonight, ’cause you never really know if.’” He stopped where the line stopped, albeit more monotone and abrupt than the script intended, and when Bottom tried to continue with feeling, Peter put a hand over the page. “What about this do you like?”

“Uh…,” Bottom reread a part to himself, thinking. “...I guess I like that it’s kind of simple? And funny. But it feels like all the characters really just...matter a lot? Like, they’re funny, but they’re also just people who are all important.”

Peter made some noise that was resting on the borderline of acknowledgement and dismissal, and he settled his face more so on Bottom than on any of the numerous pillows piled up behind him. He waited for Bottom’s attention span to do what it so often did, for him to eventually set the book down and create an opening, and when it didn’t happen, Peter had no choice but to reach out and carve an opportunity out of the doughy geography of Bottom’s cheeks. Resentment rampantly included in the action, Peter then physically turned Bottom’s face away from its focus, stopping the softly spoken lines on his lips with a little bit of tongue and a lie whispered straight into his mouth: “You did really good today.”

With his hand and then his foot, he shoved the play to the end of the bed, out of mind. In the seconds after Bottom’s grip had loosened, Peter then rolled over and straddled him, lying again with every time he had to lean back to take a breath. “I wanted to congratulate you--You were really the best part of rehearsal--And you’re right, it felt good.”

Whatever focus Bottom had had on the script of all things, he couldn’t seem to redistribute it to what was happening now. He reached out uselessly until he found the sense to mirror Peter, placing hands on his face, then his hair (though he was unsure whether or not he should disrupt the styling of Peter’s hair; he worried for the disruption of his own). “What felt good…?” he gasped.

Peter dragged his lips downward, to Bottom's jaw and below, trying and failing to gather his thoughts enough for a response. “You,” he managed, shrugging despite the fact that he wasn’t actually lying; it was shameful and weird and gross, but it was the truth because Peter could already feel the heat and the rush of blood and whatever else he was forcing out of the shadows.

“What does that mean?”

“What?” Peter glanced upward and shrugged again. “I don’t know. You feel so good.”

“I thought you were talking about being able to rehearse again?”

Peter moved back to Bottom’s mouth, letting a hand break off to travel to the edge of his shirt fabric and eventually below it. “It doesn’t matter, you--Bottom, I need--,” Peter cut himself off at need in general, because need in general was starting to drive him over the edge. He returned to the shirt edges, grabbed at them and pulled upward, trying to finish his sentence in the meantime. “-- _I need you_.”

Between the shirt being on and the shirt being on the floor, Peter lost track of who was warmer, and he was torn by wishing he’d gone for his own shirt and being caught up in the sudden feeling of Bottom’s hands on his hips. Squeezing the way he was supposed to. Peter moaned, thumbing uselessly at Bottom’s waistband because of his lack of focus. Where was the zipper? Was there a zipper? He pleaded against wherever his tongue was for Bottom to help him, only to be heard and find Bottom’s big, fat hands right in his way, doing as bad of a job of getting the zipper down as he was. Irritated, Peter grabbed at his face. “My shirt, you stupid virgin.”

Bottom kissed him and complied, and it was rough like it was supposed to be if only for how inescapably cumbersome Bottom always was. “I’m, uh, I’m not a virgin,” he murmured into the other's neck, unsure where to put the shirt or what to do with it now that it was off.

“Yeah, you are,” Peter said immediately. He yanked the zipper down once he found it, wasting no time with the underwear beneath--no, they were pink. Bright fucking pink. At least give them a minute.

“I don’t think I am, though.”

Bright fucking-- “What’s that supposed to mean? You don’t ‘think’ you are?”

“I think I’m not, but I don’t know.”

But the skin underneath was-- “How could you not know?”

“There was summer rehearsal.”

Peter paused, feeling so warm at the ears, a different kind of warmth than everything else. It was sore and overwhelming, throbbing like his headaches did. “But nothing happened last summer,” he said, suddenly searching Bottom’s face for what he wanted, apprehensive for what he expected, digging his nails straight into his own palms. Snug? Snout? Starveling? Flute?

“You keep saying that we shouldn’t talk about it, so--”

“Who the _fuck_ was it.”

Peter pulled back, pounding a fist into Bottom’s chest. His eyes were glassy with a newfound frustration, met but not exceeded by Bottom in a muted fashion of his own. “Can I talk about the summer rehearsals or not?” he asked, timid as if he wasn’t the larger of the two. “After you guys all ran off and I was...you know. I met this...woman. I think she was queen of the fairies or something? And she said she loved me. And she, uh. I think. I kind of got the sense she wasn’t going to let me leave, and. So. Yeah.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Like when my head was all…” Bottom made some gesturing to his face, miming a nose and ears before Peter reached out to stop him.

It took several shakes of the head for Peter to try and scatter away the gathering elements of the dormant migraine now rising from its slumber. He pushed back to the foot of the bed, resting a hand, by chance, on the overturned cover of _Almost, Maine_. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re--That didn’t happen,” he said.

Bottom sat up straighter, brow knit. “I think I know better than you guys do, because it happened to _me_. And I thought it might’ve been a dream, but I don’t really have dreams like that.”

“What, you don’t have dreams where you get raped by fairies all the time? That’s where you draw the line?”

“That’s not--,” Bottom hesitated, reaching for the play of all things, noticing how the pages were being bent. Peter held it away from him. “--I don’t understand why you don’t want to acknowledge it. I don’t think I can chalk it up to hysteria like you guys can because it was my head, and while you all ran off, stuff continued to happen to me. Fairies and stuff.”

“Fairies and stuff aren’t fucking real, Bottom. Why can’t you just act like a goddamn adult?” Peter spat.

“I don’t understand why you’re mad at me right now.”

Bottom followed Peter out of bed, searching for some opportunity to trade the shirt in his right hand for the play still in Peter’s left without having to force it. He stepped reluctantly over his own clothes on the ground, feeling restricted in a space that had seemed large not so long ago. “You always have to do stuff like this,” Peter told him, “And you always have to make it so easy to...to…” His face was quickly contorting into a conflicted antipathy, an impressionist painting of a handful of emotions sneaking out from beneath a tightly shut lid. “It was just a stupid midsummer night’s dream,” he said.

“Or it was a real thing that really happened to me! That you could totally write a play about! And I could play myself as the lead!”

Either Bottom hadn’t noticed during his short reply, or he hadn’t been able to make a reasonable deduction toward the meaning of Peter’s sudden glance toward the balcony just beyond the glass door beside him, but when he acted, it was second later than what was necessary to avoid a series of unfortunate actions happening all at once.

Peter threw the door open, winding his arm back and taking in the all-encompassing horror of the forest view at night in all its sounds, shapes and layers of darkness before releasing the play with a heave and sending it flying over the balcony banister. While Bottom had acted too late, he had acted, already at Peter’s back by the time the play left his fingers, and when it was in the air, he lunged after it. His fingers had tapped the spine and his weight had instantly worked against him. Like a house of cards in a gentle breeze, he went careening over the edge, and sooner than Peter could register what had happened, they were falling.

 _He_ was falling, as if he’d watched Bottom go over and as if he’d seized a part of Bottom to catch him and as if he’d doomed himself. And he couldn’t remember anything about what was below except for trees--branches that were tugging at his face and his arms--and shadows and how steep the incline had been on their trek away from the cabin. He didn’t remember the ground until he hit it, and even then, the only difference it had from the air was the force of impact; as darknesses, the two states of being were the same.

Peter couldn’t see, only feel the breath getting pushed out of his lungs by the crack of his ribs and the unforgiving earth, and even then, he kept rolling, remembering the incline. It was as if he was being dragged by whatever he still had a grip on, still firm and warm under a grasp that felt like his only remaining source of control as the roughest part of the foliage streamed past him. He didn’t know if he’d even been screaming until his body met a precipice and what was once firm beneath him turned to air again, and then to an all-enveloping cold, and to the inability to scream. The cold swallowed him, diving immediately into any open orifice as he tried to take a breath, effectually filling his lungs.

Choking, Peter writhed, moving against the screeching demand of his head cracking against the final bit of ground--cool, sharp stone that tapped along his back before he tried to open his eyes. In accordance with everything, it was pitch black, and vision stung him until he stopped to rely on feeling alone to orient himself. Wherever his grip was, it was still loosely there, and it pulled him in a direction he could only define as upward once he head had surfaced. He waded, gagging, ears suddenly full of the splash of his every movement in a deep pool of water. His lungs were already tired, and his head bobbed underneath again, repeatedly, as he sought blindly for the shore, restoring his struggle anew each time the water poured down his throat or nose. Like skipping pages in a book, a single pull separated his futile crawl and the point where he could feel the ground at his fingertips, mud and sand and grass at his cheek. He sputtered, spitting up water and whatever else his stomach was willing to give before dragging himself out of the last grip of the cold to where it was dry. Unable and unwilling to roll into his back, Peter waited for his stillness to ease the uneven rise and fall of his chest, either for it to stop or to steady as his eyes gave one last ditch effort to adjust. It was black, soon gray and black, and soon gray and black in a blurry combination of shapes. Peter made out the heaving outline of the body adjacent before anything else and withdrew his hand from a place where his nails had dug into the flesh. He waited, afraid and unable to speak without the accompanying pain. A moment passed before he realized there had been another gasp and a fit of coughing that was not his own.

“Peter?”

Peter tried to push off the ground with one arm, met with an instant, prickling pain, but the other was no better, and he had to work himself into a sitting position without the help of either. His hands slid up to his forehead, where they pressed into a hot gash of throbbing ache he thought he knew until he drew the same hands back and felt the blood on them; it separated the feeling entirely from the usual migraine. However, even in already knowing what it would look like, Peter stared until he could distinguish the blood by its glow the moonlight, in such a daze in relation to it that he was slow to look away.

“Bottom?”

Bottom held one arm against his chest, teasing at his side and sucking air through his teeth at the sensation that burned there. The skeletal remains of his glasses hung on his face, both lenses cracked past the recognition that they were once single, connected shapes, yet he looked through them, and through the blood trailing in the lines in them, to Peter’s cloudy form. He remembered his hand at his side and checked for what was still there, holding it out. “Your shirt,” he said weakly, not liking the feeling it made when the words came squirming out from his tangled ribs. He was sure he still had a grip on the fabric, even if its texture was lost to the cold, the weight of the water on it and the numbness in his fingers. He wasn’t sure if Peter was looking at him.

“Where are we?”

As if he’d recently noticed, Peter’s eyes were fixed on the trees, each one of them posing a new focal point as they bled gradually into his realm of understanding. He started to hear every noise of the woods all at once; the collection of crickets and flowing water and wind through the topmost part of the foliage, all in direct opposition to his own unsteady breathing, had him deeply afraid. “Where are we?” he repeated, conscious this time of how his voice scratched in his throat.

“I think we fell.”

“I _know_ we fell,” Peter snapped. “ _Where_?” He looked for the cabin’s shadow, and when he couldn’t find it, he looked for the last bit of ground he had touched before hitting the water, which was a wasted effort in the dark. The realm of his perception limited itself to the surrounding, massive tree trunks and the lake he’d crawled out of. If he squinted, he felt he could make out the jagged face of an overhang on a distant bit of shore, but if he looked for too long his head would swim again.

“It’ll be okay, we just have to--,” Bottom paused, making some effort to stand and wincing as he put weight on a bloody mess of a leg. “--We just have to walk back.”

“Walk back to where? Where are we? Where’s the cabin?”

Bottom tried to offer the shirt again, failing to wring it out with the single hand he could even manage to move. “It’ll be okay,” he said again. “It’ll be just like when we were in scouts.”

“No." Peter felt the rate of his breathing begin to accelerate. He shook his head. "No, fuck you. Fuck you, this is your fault.” He struggled to stand on quivering legs, glancing at Bottom for the first time to see that he was a sculpture of scratched and broken skin. His glasses, like the fractured windows of an abandoned chapel, obscured his eyes, but he seemed too dazed to bother with their removal, and too battered to realize that he’d fallen in his underwear alone. The image welled in Peter’s chest, and it hurt too badly to keep it there. Along with everything else, his eyes began to sting, perhaps having taking in too much water. “It’s because you don’t know how to read a fucking room,” he said. “Because you can’t just stop and realize that nobody wanted you to fucking come. Last summer was a goddamn disaster because of you, and everyone thinks so. Flute and Starveling and everybody thinks so. We’re going to die out here because you have no fucking sense of self-awareness, you hateful piece of shit--,” Peter broke off then, having lost control of his breathing completely. He sank back to his knees, his hands shaking beneath him in the dirt.

And in hearing him had continued, Bottom grew sheepish. He considered the shirt again, but instead turned to survey the trees in search of a path. Peter wouldn’t look, and once he'd chosen a direction, Bottom tried to get his attention with a voice that was even weaker than before. “We, uh...We just need to find a hill, maybe. And head up. Because the cabin is up.”

It took the feeling of the damp cloth of his shirt and a hand on his shoulder for Peter’s eyes drifted upward. He followed Bottom's slow extension of an index finger, seeing nothing beyond it aside from what was already around them: trees and sounds of which were all equally terrifying. He shrugged Bottom off, standing again for lack of any other choice. He had to force himself to breathe again, speaking before he was fully able. “We’re going to get lost. We’re going to die out here." It was like thinking out loud, or shaping the few breaths he had into verbal anxieties. His legs were stiff and one of his ankles hissed with hurt on each step, but again, for lack of choice, they set out. However, in the case of walking, Peter was better off than Bottom, who limped along if only because he had to. The inconsistent forest floor did nothing for him in this instance, littered with twigs and uneven lumps of plant life that sent him leaning to one side or the other. In the dark, it was impossible to distinguish a trail, and as they ventured blindly forth, Peter made the continual mistake of reaching for a bit of Bottom’s shirt to grab, finding nothing until he finally resigned to holding his arms close to himself. This became another point of resentment, and when Bottom checked on him from over his shoulder, Peter scowled.

“We’re probably almost back,” Bottom offered quietly. “I was pretty good at orienteering--See?” He rounded a large, red oak, where he stopped to rest with his attention now on the ground. The moonlight shone down through the leafy ceiling in a wider birth than elsewhere, glowing a gentle blue over a circle of mushrooms in the dirt. “It’s just like what Snout and the guys found, which means the path has got to be, like, close…,” Bottom breathed. The corners of his mouth twitched like he wanted to smile, but he remembered the pain he was in. At the circle’s edge, he halted for half a moment, brief enough for it to be blamed on the simple stumble of an injured man even if it had an emotional under layer. At piece of steep rock, he let his weight fall to break there, where he could take a more sufficient breath than any that he had been taking. “...I don’t think there’s anything wrong with admitting to everything that happened. You saw it,” he said. Moonlight hit his face, shining off of every speck of blood and water on his uneven skin.

“I don’t know what I saw, but it wasn’t your stupid fucking delusions,” Peter replied, shoving past to put his hands on the rock for himself. Instead of moonlight, he saw opportunity, and he reached up, falling just short of what he was sure was the ledge. High as it seemed, he began to search around for some footing in the stone. It hurt his bare feet, but everything hurt--even more so when he heaved himself upward--so it didn’t matter. He tried to climb.

“Peter--”

Ignoring a final cry from every part of himself, Peter pulled himself over the ridge. At the top, his face rested close to a massive, fallen branch, which, together with the circle of mushrooms, painted a familiar picture. Peter felt hollowed out by sudden relief, and his next bout of pain didn’t come until Bottom called out from a few feet below.

“Peter, I can’t get up.”

Bottom stared up from where he stood, able to reach with a single arm to where his fingertips crept over the cliff’s edge, but his other arm was frozen where he held it, and his leg was hardly meant to support him in any fashion in the state that it was in. A minute went by with Peter watching as if it all might change, and when it didn't, he considered the forest around him, shivering. “This is the way back,” he said. Even his voice was shivering.

“But I can’t--We could look for another way.”

A chill ran down Peter's spine and settled somewhere in his stomach. “Why do you do this?” He gripped the edge just shy of Bottom’s fingers, purposely avoided the bits of eye he could see through the cracked lens. “You make it so easy to just...hate you.”

Bottom swallowed. “I’m not doing anything. We can find another way up if we just follow...uh...If we get lost, maybe the fairy circle means we can find those fairies from before to show us the way back…”

“Just like that. You don’t have to do that,” Peter argued. His chest hurt.

“I’m not trying to do anything. If you’re scared, I’ll protect you. I’m not scared of anything.”

“If--,” Peter’s breathing hitched as if his body was giving him a last chance to reconsider what he was about to say. There was no solace to be found in his surroundings, though he took a second to actively, desperately search for it. He was still shivering, forcing himself to finish. “--If you want your fucking fairy friends to show you around, that’s fine. But I promise none of the guys are going to come looking for you.”

Watched with wide eyes behind cracked glasses, Peter then backed away from the ledge, ducking under the fallen branch to stumble into the darkness on his own. Bottom called after him, obscuring all of Peter’s senses with the sound of his own name until it grew weaker, raspier and finally cut away with distance. He marched onward with a new stage of darkness overtaking his vision, forcing his hands against stones and trees to try and navigate toward the path he knew to be just farther than where he was.

In the process, Peter waited for the beginning of the incline, and he waited, and walked, and waited.

His head was beginning to hurt him more now that he was alone with it, and when he dabbed at it again with his palm, his hand came back down with more blood than he expected. While he couldn’t see very well anymore, he glanced away from it, over his shoulder, and waited for Bottom to call for him again. What he saw then was a stretch of shadows he didn’t recognize anything he’d passed. The fallen branch was long gone, and in every direction, the trees began to look like carbon copies of one another. He waited for an incline.

And walked, and waited.

Eventually, from what he could see in the tunneled bastardization of his vision, the ground began to grow closer, and he felt a similar amount of relief to what came from making it over the previous bit of rock. He allowed the second hollowness, yet it soon dragged him so close to the ground that he came to the understanding that, incline or not, he had lost his ability to remain upright. The relief was gone as soon as it had come, and in an unceremonious crash into the earth, everything went as black as before.

Somebody was laughing.

Peter heard somebody--two people? More?--laughing at him. Soft whispers, verse, like in a song or an old poem, first echoed at a distance, then tickling his ears, but he didn’t understand them at all. They were surely meant to be coherent, but like any conversation in another language, the dialogue swapped between voices was fast and distorted, and it carried on for so long that Peter grew more used to it than he was curious of it. There were pauses, and the rises and falls of any conversation, and then something warm fell over Peter's eyelids--blood, he supposed. Teeming blood from his head, or spilling water from his hair, but it couldn’t have been the water, because the water was cold. It was heavy, thick and scented so pleasantly, more lilac than copper. Indeed, it smelled so heavily of florals and herbs, but it had to be blood, he thought, and he became afraid to open his eyes at all. He was dead, or dying, he thought, and when he felt a hand on his chest, and one on his cheek, he thought it might be God. Those thoughts were all mixed together, as one; speaking, bleeding, blooming, dying, God.

“Peter?”

Peter felt the hands' embrace, turning to arms supporting him and pulling him off of the hard patch of earth. His head was especially warm.

“Peter?”

He leaned into what enveloped him and thought how all his fear might be draining out of him, like rosy water out of the bath. All the blood from his head might be draining out of him. Hearing laughter again, this time very distant, he suddenly felt he had no choice but to open his eyes now, blood or no. Yet, when he did, he thought that he must have been right.

“Peter.”

It was very nearly God.


	10. Omission A

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Peter Quince and the rest of his newly christened band of actors would love nothing more than to leave the past behind them, the past is swift, stupid and unavoidable. Yet, as cruel as it is, Peter strives to make the best of a bad situation.

The air was unusually brisk, and in a rare event, a sprinkling of leaves tough enough to crunch paved a pathway of sound through the wilderness. Orienteering, fun as it was, had been forgotten by its participants the very second a hand was raised in the air, an index finger unfolding to indicate the grayish folds of the natural sphere sitting high in the branches of a young sequoia. Instantly, standard-issue binoculars were being fished quickly out of each and every backpack, and hungry eyes peered through their lenses to confirm what could only be supposed upon: up in the tree there was the undeniable activity of the sphere’s fierce inhabitants, a powerful colony of wasps, whose buzzing could steadily be heard when a boy cupped his hands around his ears and trained them in that direction as they all had been shown to do in a nighttime game of hide-and-seek long ago. 

The scouts abandoned their path, one by one, lining up at a distance from the nest according to the direction of the two eldest. They were, incidentally, the only ones in the group who bore a certain patch--rather, the tabs of old soda cans affixed to their lapels with a safety pin and adorned each with a small, blue ribbon. All the meaning of the emblem was lost upon the adults, though it sat ever-present in the minds of every boy in the troop; to them, it was equal in importance to any other facet of their uniforms, with the added condition of its secrecy which made it special. It was cool and interesting until that meaning came forward through its dreadful demonstration, which loomed in the near future. The scouts glanced nervously among each other under its shadow, and Nick found that, likely because he was the second tallest, he was unlucky enough to have several pairs of eyes land in his direction. It was only a matter of time before he stood beneath the patch’s catalyst with his back mere inches from the redwood trunk. The ones possessing the patch already paced back and forth about the line, refreshing the minds of everyone regarding traditional procedure. Peter stood toward the end, eyes trained on the collection of stones gathered carefully by his feet, fidgeting until he was warned not to by the older boys.

They were eleven.

With his hands folded formally behind his back, the eldest first explained the surreptitiousness that must be associated with the soda tab before an attempt could even begin to be made at describing the process, let alone earning it. “If the scoutmaster finds out,” he told them, “the fun will be ruined for everyone and the practice likely banned.” Nick mouthed the word ‘fun’ to see if it really fit right in this situation; it didn’t, but no one would look at him for that bit of insight. 

A bigger boy--most of them were bigger--shoved Peter out of a moment of thought, and he began passing stones down the line of boys, the total wealth of them ranging in size from penny to ping-pong to softball. Each boy was given one, and the two already granted the patch stood to the side, the elder leader pointing to where the wasps were meters above Nick’s head. Should anyone throw their stone and hit that nest, the patch was theirs. Should no one hit it, Nick figured he might experience something a little closer to ‘fun’ than a thousand wasps crashing down on top of him. 

Names were called by the second eldest, who was pretending to be an adult when he was given the room for minor authority. He didn’t want anyone chickening out, their stone abandoned or thrown too far astray, so the pace of the names began to gradually pick up in order to rob the troup any room to consider what they were doing. By the time it came to a single hesitation between names--two or three stones in the air at a time, all missing by a narrow margin--it was closing in on Peter’s turn. Nick searched for him down the line, eyes snapping shut instinctively when a stone got too close, flinching names before finding the boy, still at the end, turning his stone over briefly in his hands.

“Quince!”

Peter hesitated, squeezing something about as big as his palm against his chest, and as he threw, he squeezed his eyes shut in lieu of aim, The result was a moment where the stone left his hand and traveled so far to the side that it pelted the eldest straight in the chin. Hearing the boy cry out, Peter opening his eyes again, catching a glimpse of Nick’s face before he saw his stone  fly beyond the lower treeline. The eldest tossed it with a ferocious wind-up, and the very second Peter couldn’t see it anymore, he grew pale. It had been an egregious error, and already, he began to take several steps backward, hoping for the blame to be lost in the crowd. Yet, the leader’s eyes were already trained on him like one of the birds of prey they’d all be shown at the nature center a week ago, now with the addition of tight fists and a crowd of other boys slowly realizing their activity was about to be cut short a second time. In the few short seconds before another name was called, Peter already had a hand grabbing at his uniform to prevent him from running back to the safety of the camp, and the eldest started in his direction with some threatening hiss of words that Nick couldn’t make out. 

In the next second, as Nick reached for one of the discarded stones in the dirt to...do something with, as Peter threw his arms up in front of his face, another, different stone came flying not in an upward trajectory, nor in the typical arc of the others, but instead spiraling directly toward the flesh above Nick’s right eye. What sounded as a single  _ thump  _ gave him a brief glimpse of the sky as he toppled over and lost consciousness. 

One of the older boys shoved Peter forward, indicating that the only thing that stood between him and his inevitable punishment was an amateur patch-job as everyone remembered themselves. Someone had checked the time, another had suggested the scoutmaster was wondering where they were, and in the subsequent, verbal comotion, Peter fished a first aid kit out of his backpack, searching for the big band-aids with shaking hands. Over him, he was battered with the insistence that he was being a nuisance, that he hurry up, and that the lot of them were ready to tell the scoutmaster that he was one who had ‘pushed Bottom’ such that he suffered such an abominable injury. 

When Nick came to, his mom was called, and the boys were scattered, with a few of them cornering Peter out of view of the scoutmaster's office. The boy took his beating soundlessly. Nick only caught sight of him again later, when he went to meet his mom in the main lodge. He arrived in time to hear the last bit of a loud scolding and the door to the scoutmaster's office creek back open. Peter stepped out with an ice pack pressed against his eye, following an order to take a seat wherever Nick was sitting and make amends. He timidly crossed the room to a bench facing the office, muttering that he was sorry under his breath as soon as Nick was close enough to hear. It wasn’t long after that Nick’s mom actually arrived, giving him a short kiss on the top of the head before marching into the office herself. The sound of scolding resumed, and Nick worried over the length and the volume and how his mother was really going at it despite how she was--

He folded his hands in his lap, mimicking Peter, who kept his eyes on the small square of glass on the door to the scoutmaster’s office. In the exchange of voices, he lowered his ice pack, handing it over without saying anything about it. When Nick wouldn’t initially take it, Peter pressed it closer to him, insisting despite the fact that it put the only color in his face on display; his paleness now had the jarring addition of the bruise around his eye and the dab of red beneath his nose.

Nick took the pack from him, holding it loosely while he dabbed at the portion of his forehead just above his eye that still seemed to be bleeding. He felt as if he should say something, stopped abruptly in his thought process by his continual mistake of looking at Peter’s eye again and feeling bad. “Mom’s pulling me from scouts, I think,” he said finally.

“That sucks.” Peter still had his eyes trained on the door. “Sorry,” he said again.

Even if the other boy wouldn't see it, Nick smiled. “It’s no big deal. I’ll have a chance to do something new maybe. My cousin just went to acting camp, and she said that was fun. I could try that,” he said, leaving some space for Peter to comment. It was empty space. “Uh...are you gonna stick with it?”

More empty space. Peter shrugged, pressing his lips tightly together before they eventually parted. “I guess,” he said at last.

“You’ve probably got more friends here than I do”

Empty space. Nick’s bad feeling returned. 

“Thanks, by the way,” he continued, receiving in reply the immediate and startled gaze of Peter for the handful of seconds before he remembered the door and turned back to it. “For what?” he muttered, looking not just to the door but to the windows and hallways and behind the tables, as if he was afraid of seeing someone standing there.

“For missing on purpose.”

“What?”

Nick shifted in his seat. “With your rock,” he said, lifting the ice pack from his head to touch at the gash beneath; it was second nature to him, as it was to any scout, to poke at the wound to see how it hurt. A slight tap of his fingers was met with a small sting. “You threw it right at him, so you wouldn’t hit the bees or me or anything. So maybe he’d stop. Thanks.”

Before Nick could finish with a high-five or a pat on the back, Peter moved a good few inches away; his ears were gaining color now, reddening deeply until they were their darkest possible shade. His response caught in his throat, where it remained as the office door swung open, robbing him of the chance to say anything back. 

Nick’s mom was first to step out into the main room, frail as she was, stomping forward with her usual and unending ferocity (which now reminded Nick of every wasp in the hive combined). She marched over to him, helping him out of his seat and quickly clamping down on his hand as if he was about to float away like a balloon before she could check on his wound for herself. Without saying so, Nick was thankful for her shift to tenderness, imagining how long it might last and how long it might benefit her. She brushed his cheek with her fingers, considerably thinner than they had been just last time Nick had felt them. He withheld a shudder until they moved down to his shoulder, and soon the tenderness began to dissipate. Following Nick’s own gaze, her eyes landed on Peter, still seated, and she murmured something in spanish under her breath. It was really only a sound to him, but it was a sound Nick usually heard when he was in trouble. He murmured back, intent on dissolving the mercilessness in her once again. “No, Mamá, that’s my friend, he’s really nice.” 

His mom pursed her lips. “Look at him making faces, mijo. Nice?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re sure?”

“ _ Mamá _ .”

Looking to prove her point, Nick’s mom fixated on Peter as he slid down from his place, but instead of looking back, he stared at his feet as he passed them. 

“See you in school,” Nick whispered.

Peter made some noise in his throat before lifting his head and promptly changing tones. “I didn’t know she had cancer,” he said, louder. He reluctantly joined a number of boys who were spilling in through the main set of doors, glowering at him like he wasn’t a person. They were more confident in a pack, one that swallowed Peter up with one hand shoving his head downward the moment he was within reach and another pushing at his back while they all giggled over something that wasn’t funny. The tan of his uniform mixed in with the others.

“You be careful who you’re making friends with,” Nick’s mom told him, watching the boys disappear as a group before the scoutmaster could corral them.


	11. Pyramus and Thisbe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Peter Quince and the rest of his newly christened band of actors would love nothing more than to leave the past behind them, the past is swift, stupid and unavoidable. Yet, as cruel as it is, Peter strives to make the best of a bad situation.

“--You should totally be dead.”

Nick Bottom looked up from the drink he’d been twisting in his hand, yanked back into the space he hadn’t really left. Around him, visitors, patients and doctors alike materialized in a cloud of whites and pastels with Flute standing at the forefront in deep green. He unscrewed the cap on the drink he'd gotten for himself, sinking into the open seat he'd left at Nick’s side. 

Nick waited for him to take a drink before speaking. “What did you say?” He drank again from his own bottle, finding his mouth incredibly dry.

“I said, ‘The doctors thought Peter and you should totally be dead.’ Adrenalin’s a real-life miracle worker. Crazy shit.”

“Oh.”

Across the hospital lobby, Peter noticed them over the paper he'd been filling out. To the chagrin of the nurse sitting opposite of the counter he was at, he paused, waving. A smile sat gently below his nose, like an obvious forgery on a famous painting.

It had taken two days to find him. Nick had stumbled blindly through the greater part of the woods, hand trailing along the risen ground in the same way it used to on the walls of his childhood home until it eventually sloped downward into the grass. Through his methodism, he found his way back to the edge of the hiking trail, and on the trek up the endless set of wooden stairs, he dipped in and out of a complete conscious as the steps took their toll on him. His vision was already muddled by broken lenses, and it deteriorated into simple, darkly colored shapes by the time he was sure he had reached the cabin’s edge; he knew it by bleed of light, the dim orange that overtook the growing spots of black and gray before him, and by the heat that began to tug at the unwounded parts of his flesh the nearer he came to the door. Once inside, he took in voices with no real cohesion, sliding to the flat, wooden floor he’d previously taken for granted. “Is Peter not back yet?” he responded, unable to hear even himself.

It had taken two days for Nick to return to the woods, allowed only out of the pessimism and desperation of the rest of the company. Like a flock of birds, they called Peter’s name out in droves, punctuated by Snout’s insistence that he couldn’t have gone far, that the forest wasn’t that big, and by the lot of them remembering Nick at the back of the group, traipsing silently behind. As hard as they were all trying to avoid bringing up the notion that their director was likely dead, they couldn’t help but express the belief through vaguely related questions regarding the kind of injuries he suffered, how far they’d really fallen and so on and so forth. When it came to a comment on Peter’s size in comparison to Nick’s, how Nick was sturdier (ergo luckier), Nick broke away from the company entirely. He limped on his own in a meaningless direction, where the trees were spread wide apart and the ground was flat. 

By himself, it had taken two minutes. He spotted Peter immediately among the leaves and tripped when trying to run toward him. “Peter?” Unable to properly catch himself, Nick went crashing to the ground, angering the wrist that had managed to stay out of a sling as if it didn’t even matter. He edged his way across the ground to where Peter lay, pushing away the bits of leaves and twigs colored in dried blood until his hand found Peter’s chest. “Peter.” With some effort, Nick leaned down to listen for breathing. He brushed flower petals off of Peter’s cheeks, picking away what had stuck to the blood caked on his forehead and lifting him up, giving him a soft jostle in the process. “Peter.”

What remained of the petals--and they existed in abundance--fell to the dirt in a small pile as Peter’s eyes fluttered open, blinking until they expelled the clouds of drowsiness settled in front of their damp reflection of the sky. Although he was awake, he stared up at Nick with his head in a fog, like he didn’t fully understand the face hanging over him until minutes later, when his eyes began to widen to take it all in. “How did I get in t’heaven?” he asked, speaking with all the poise of someone whose tongue didn’t quite fit in their mouth, and moving languidly in the meantime to close the gap between his and Nick’s faces with the tender touch of his lips. It was something much warmer, softer and milder than anything previous, and it ended abruptly with Peter falling limp again.

“You’re not going to wave back?” 

Flute nudged Nick in the arm, remembering the sling that was there only after the short burst of pain had already rattled up Nick’s shoulder. He apologized, burying his casual splash of guilt in another drink. “It’s okay,” Nick replied, meaning it.

An additional comment about how strong his arms were halted halfway up his throat, and it sunk back down from there, feeling very heavy once it got to its place in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t feel strong or sturdy or lucky. He found it difficult to associate the wave across the lobby with himself, and by the time he was able to consider responding, Peter had already lowered his arm, finishing a last bit of paperwork and marching over as best he could. He held out the cast on his own arm--smaller, thinner and less broken. “We match,” he said.

Looking at Nick was like getting a blanket out of the dryer, like getting to finally lay down at the very end of the day, and Peter didn't want to stop looking. He didn't know what to do with himself, so he said something stupid. He didn't know where to put his hands or especially what to say afterward, because Nick wasn’t saying anything, instead finding a bit of trouble with associating Peter's pleasantness with himself in addition to everything else. It meant that Peter had to offer what he had to fill the space. He rested his good hand on Nick’s shoulder. “We should, uh...Before we get back to rehearsal, we should celebrate,” he continued. “Being alive, I mean.”

From out of Peter's main line of focus, there was the sudden sound of Flute trying to drink and laugh at the same time, and choking a bit was the compromise. “I’m down if we do what we usually do to celebrate,” he said, screwing the cap back on his drink before it harmed him further.

Peter scowled. “I meant just me and Bottom.”

“Peter, I hate to tell you this, but we all agreed to call the bet off when you guys almost died, so if that's what you had in mind--”

“I meant dinner. Fuck off.”

“You’re going to celebrate being alive by having dinner with Bottom? Are you fucking...okay? Is your head okay?”

“You guys had a bet…?” Nick mumbled between the two of them. 

They looked to him in unison--Flute like he’d already forgotten Nick was there and Peter like he’d just sworn in front of his child--and quieted; Peter especially, as if he was trying to prove that the redness in a person’s face could quiet them. “My head is fine,” he muttered, tapping at the little square of gauze on his temple to confirm its steady existence and brushing a loose bit of hair behind his ear in the same breath. “I want to spend time with Bottom because I like Bottom. Because I love him.”

“You  _ what _ ?” Nick and Flute shared a thought, but only Flute thought it aloud like that.

Peter went a deep crimson. “I love him,” he repeated. “I love everything about him. He has soft hair and pretty eyes and his voice is like honeyed lightning in a bottle!”

His voice had gotten steadily louder to where he ended on a declaration that garnered the attention of those at the far end of the lobby. Before he could escalate anymore (as if he was capable), Flute leaped out of his seat, grabbing him by the shoulder. He leaned in with a bout of extended eye contact, like trying to identify an imposter, but he didn’t have enough of a recollection of Peter’s eyes to take anything away from it. They were harsh and damp, and that was as normal as Flute knew them to be. He laughed because it was quiet now, and he was uncomfortable. “Maybe dial it back, dude. I doubt it was that good.”

“We actually didn’t--,” Nick tried to cut in, losing the steam behind his sentence halfway through it. Peter seemed to have had the same thought he did, but he was the only one that said it aloud, and Peter was the only one who took that thought and turned it into a realization, then into bedroom eyes.

“I’m ready to find out,” he said, again too loud as Flute took the cue that it was time to usher him out into the parking lot. 

On the drive home, Peter was made to sit in the front, or Nick resigned himself to the shadows of the back, where he felt similarly awkward and excluded but more out of the way in the process. He couldn’t twiddle his thumbs with one hand in a sling, settling instead for the emotional equivalent of staring out the window at the whirring passage of buildings while Flute carried on his conversation as he drove, lowering his voice as if the barrier between the front seat and back was enough to erase him completely. “Is your head seriously okay?” he whispered to Peter.

It was too easy for Peter to go back to scowling when Nick was behind him. “Quit being a jackass,” he responded, now just as quiet. “I’d like to get back to the cabin and back to rehearsing, thank you very much.”

“Well, see, that’ll be tough, because we could only rent the cabin for the long weekend, and you spent the last couple of days swapping places with a changeling who actually enjoys rehearsals,” said Flute.

“There’s nothing wrong with looking forward to it, looking forward to--”

“To Bottom’s acting? Come  _ on _ , Peter.”

Nick pressed his brow against the window, watching the subtle shift of blue to orange to black behind the cloud layer. If not for the bumps in the road, he might have enjoyed the cool press of the glass on his forehead; he might have even found the opportunity to nap through the pain and the unavoidable conversation that still continued onward. In his lap, his phone was open to a map of directions to his apartment, and he would occasionally glance at the ETA, which didn’t seem to budge. The movement of the little, blue dot that signified their position inched along with all the fury of a ball that had deflated, and soon, it halted completely. Traffic, Nick supposed, until he drifted back to the view outside to discover they had left the highway behind, and Flute was pulling to park by a nearing sidewalk. Nick tried to remember where the conversation had gone between checks on how close he was to home, catching the last bit of Peter’s voice raising again. “--No, fuck you. If you don’t let me get out, I’ll roll out. Bottom?” He had a hand stretched into the backseat to get Nick’s attention, and his face was colored fiercely in the shadow of the sunset framed behind him. “Bottom, we’re getting dinner.”

Flute groaned. “Peter, you’re not going to go get dinner fresh out of the hospital. You need to go home and lay down. I’m driving you home.”

“I’ll call a fucking Uber. Bottom.”

Not knowing what else to do, and moving robotically, Nick pushed his door open, sliding out onto the asphalt with some difficulty. In addition to his crutches, he balanced himself on the side of the car, finding it a bit more complicated to maneuver around it than it was to take a few steps around a hospital lobby, but not quite as complicated as the hiking trail in the forest. He passed into the cold shade of the In-N-Out where he met Peter, who struggled to remove a bag of his belongings from Flute’s car using his only available arm and ignoring Flute in the process. “I can’t leave you guys on the sidewalk, you look like ward escapees,” Flute called through the passenger’s side window.

“We look fine. We’re going to have dinner,” Peter argued, betraying his commitment to snubbing the other almost immediately. 

As soon as Nick was close enough, Peter clung to him. “We don’t have to get dinner,” he whispered down to him; he was hungry, but he was also confused, perhaps ready to wake up.

“Do you not like In-N-Out?” Peter whispered back.

“No, I do.”

A soft curve returned to Peter’s lips, and after blinking once or twice, Nick recognized it as a smile. He had a loose grasp of its warmth, though it was like spotting something in the distance or in a summer haze. Something in a dream. Yet, in his leg, he felt the sort of pain he was only confident he could be provided in waking life, and he left the notion of the dream outside with Flute and with Peter’s insistence that he save whatever else he had to say for the next rehearsal. The air conditioning of the In-N-Out then hit Nick like a train, and he shivered at the difference in temperature between the interior and Peter’s fingers at his wrist. “We  _ are _ going to pick rehearsals back up, then?” he mumbled.

Peter squeezed, reluctantly letting go when he realized how awkward it was to move and hold hands as they were. “I really want to, yeah. I want to rewrite the whole script a little, but I really want to watch you some more,” he said, ordering after.

“Like...rewrite it how?” Nick asked quietly. He squinted, greeted with the blurry reminder that he hadn’t bothered to put his contacts in, that his glasses had been thoroughly destroyed. He was distracted by trying to remember menu items and lines at the same time, wondering what might be different in both. The moment they were still, Peter had latched onto him again. 

“I think I could write something better for you. With more lines. Do you want to share fries or something?”

“No, that’s okay. Uh. Better?”

“Yeah, like...just something...really good. Something worthwhile. I want to write something worthwhile,” Peter concluded.

Nick glanced at him, finding him close enough to be shockingly clear, and he looked back with bright blue eyes that really quite different from how they’d been before in their brightness alone. Like the sun, it was a trial to look directly at them for too long. “And you think putting more of me in there is going to do that…?” Nick said slowly, feeling a sort of pain again that he wanted to be from his leg, instead knowing that it stemmed from the space in his chest and bloomed between his bruised and broken ribs. The roots stretched up into his head, plucking away at the pieces of Pyramus that were still there like uncovering all manner of bugs from beneath a rock in place of the treasure was he was sure he had buried. They crawled and squirmed in the dirt, mimicking the sound of a portrayal of death Nick was newly ashamed. He tried speaking over the noise. “When you told Flute that you loved me...was that like...a joke or something?”

“No.”

Above everything else, the most major difference was that, when Nick looked in Peter in the eyes, as opposed to anything previously, he wasn’t lying.


	12. Omission B

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Peter Quince and the rest of his newly christened band of actors would love nothing more than to leave the past behind them, the past is swift, stupid and unavoidable. Yet, as cruel as it is, Peter strives to make the best of a bad situation.

Every time Nick gave Peter a quick, backwards glance, he was reminded of the thick lines of sharpie smeared across the boy’s locker. The words were still entirely visible, and the only reason Peter had bothered to disturb them at all was on the teacher’s assistance. From what Nick could tell at a distance, he didn’t seem phased by the harshness of the scattered phrases. Then and now, Peter’s expression was equally flat, laboring only in a small crease in his brow. He was distracted by the heat, and his attention flitted between photos hung on the wall. “Are you hungry or anything?” Nick tried, feeling through the silence like he was swimming in dark water. “I helped make some pan dulce a little earlier, so if you want some…” 

They were twelve.

Peter kept his eyes trained on the wall, on a photo of a distant relative. His face passively rested in a frown. It grew a bit wider as Nick continued. “Glad you could make it, by the way. I was worried, because the other guys were kinda busy. That’s what their moms said, I guess.”

“So, no one else is here?”

Nick shrugged. “Yeah, I thought it was kinda weird. Like, everybody’s busy--what are the odds, you know?” He couldn’t recall a single boy in the neighborhood that he had actually wanted to see, or whose face he could remember on its own.

“I mean, no one really wants to go to block party when it’s a million degrees outside.”

“Which is why we moved it to inside?” Nick replied with a second shrug and a hand fishing around for the knob of his bedroom door without help from his eyes. 

Apart from his bed, the room was a little claustrophobic, with one corner being dedicated to the closet and the other to the TV, and the shelf of books and games beneath it. Behind the shelf, a fan was propped in the windowsill, running so that a small bit of the air it provided actually made it over the TV top. Nick let it blow in his face for a moment before dropping to his knees, moving some of books aside to uncover a first and second Gamecube controller. The sweat on his hands made it difficult to untangle the cords, but with legs crossed, Nick persisted, motivated by the way Peter stood in the doorway like he was awaiting instruction. “What kind of games do you like?” Bottom asked, picking through titles with one hand as he worked out the final kink with the other; he finally held the second controller out.

Peter slowly sunk to the floor, turning the controller over in his hands. “I don’t care,” he said quietly. He pulled his knees up to his chest to avoid taking up any large amount of space when he was already small for his age.

After watching the other and making an educated guess, Nick found something simple to play. However, he made to mistake of clicking through the menus too quickly, catching Peter’s frustration only after the main game had already started. “Do you want me to go back a second?” he asked.

Peter shook his head and tightened his grip on his controller. “I just…,” he grew even quieter, “...I didn’t catch which button it was to...you know…,” Peter finally grew so quiet that he trailed off, pressing a button or two without meaning.With his eyes firmly set on the ground, he missed Nick’s smile, which meant well but would have only angered him, looking up only when he heard the game pause and switch to an overview of the instructions. He spoke up again after unpausing. “I’m not stupid or anything, I just forgot.”

“Yeah, they’re kind of weird,” Nick replied. The core mechanics of the game were few and far between, tied almost entirely to three buttons, all which Nick had been able to grasp without use of the instructions in the first place. But he assumed he was just naturally good at these sorts of things. “If you want, I can hang back and let you win a few. Just to get the hang of it,” he offered.

“No, it’s just that--,” Peter paused, clicking whatever he needed to jump, because jumping was almost what he wanted to do. It was almost punching. “--It’s that the timing doesn’t make any sense. And you got a better character, so it’s not fair.”

It occurred to Nick that, with his cheeks blooming red as they were and his eyes wandering around on a constant trek of their surroundings, Peter was at least a little cute. He was cute. Over an eruption of laughter from the parents in the kitchen, Nick watched the other boy’s face change, his teeth pushing down into his lip as a product of his struggle. Nick tapped absently at his own controller, and it changed again; his jaw dropped open as his character jumped one more time before being killed and a groan slid out of his mouth. It was a simple slip of the hand, but still to the ultimate effect of Peter turning just a shade darker in frustration. “It doesn’t make sense,” he repeated under his breath.

Nick grew conscious of his heart in his chest, like it was something he had recently swallowed. He set his controller down, leaning over and reaching to place his hands atop Peter’s own. They were small and warm. “It’s like this,” Nick murmured, leading Peter in the very basics of gameplay. He tapped down with a mind toward restraining his assumption of his own strength in order to preserve the softness in each of Peter’s fingers. Looking down for a second, he marveled at how his own hadn’t ever been so delicate. They were fat and brown, and though they weren't as sweaty as usual, he could feel his blood pushing around in the tips. It had traveled from his heart and back again in an instant. Yet, before he grew too encased, the image of Peter's locker returned. It was like the universe stomping down on a vein. 

“You keep pictures of your mom in your room?”

Peter had let the controller go, eyes wandering away from the two characters now idled on screen. He moved away to the only other available space on the floor, pulling at the corner of the photograph sitting on a box at the corner of the bed. As Peter held it out, Nick re-emerged from the thought he’d been caught in until he was staring into the face of his mother, who smiled back at him despite how her skin was so taut against the curves of her skull that it seemed smiling might rip it apart.

“Not usually,” Nick tried to explain, reaching to turn the photo over; Peter wouldn't let him. “My abuelita’s letting me pick which picture to frame for when we hang it up, because we’ve got ones of her with, um. With hair and without.” Newly solemn, he indicted the photo that had been beneath the first. His mother again.

“I didn’t know she died already.” 

Nick swallowed a large lump in his throat and nodded. “A couple weeks ago, yeah.”

“Was that the day you got that phone call during gym, and you went home early?”

“Yeah.”

“’Cause you needed to be there while she died or ‘cause she already died?”

“Uh. She…’cause she already died. Before I could get there.”

“That sucks.”

He looked up again, nodded again. Swallowed again, hard. It had been a long enough since his last real conversation for him to believe he had hardened, and now he felt that ideal chipping away like dry paint.

“Yeah.”

Like the smile of the woman was genuine in both photos, and it hurt him. 

“I, um...I heard cancer’s pretty brutal and stuff. Like, you’re in a lot of pain the whole time...”

More swallowing. More nodding. Nick picked his mother’s picture up with trembling fingers that were trying not to tremble. He turned it over. “Uh. Yeah.”

“Was it...hard to get used to her just...not having any hair?”

“Yeah. Um. It.” With his fat, brown fingers, he pressed his hand over the back of the photo, to cover it up or hold it down. His face was scrunching up, try as he might to prevent it, his words caught somewhere in the twist of his mouth as it tried to avoid the inevitable frown. From just the pressure of his hand over the photo and the blood in his hand, he tried to hold it all in, tried to swallow again. For a moment, he thought he might be able, then he felt Peter’s fingers at the edge of his other hand, prying it off the carpet to the end of lacing their fingers together, and Nick let go a string of shuddering breaths as he began to cry. After a few squeezes, Peter moved in closer, imposing his arms around Nick’s shoulders and containing him in a hug that lasted as long as it took for him to bring his sobs down to a less audible level. 

“I’m sorry,” Peter whispered, as if it was a secret.

Nick shook his head. “’M really glad you could come over,” he whispered back.

Around him, Nick felt Peter’s grip loosen just short of a total release. Peter hid his face in Nick’s shoulder as in a reversal of comfort, and his breath fluttered weakly in Nick’s ear. “Don't tell anyone, okay?”

“What?”

Releasing him, Peter rose. On his face he wore the same expression with which he used to smudge away the writing on his locker--for he had really done it with look more than damp cloth, with dull eyes that eroded the inky streaks into a pitiful gray. It pulled Nick away from himself as quick as the initial sadness had come, but the image that had pulled made it impossible for him to be any variation of thankful.

“Just don't.”

In the same rigid fashion as how he’d gone to class that day, Peter moved to the door. As if he’d done something shameful or sickening, his face had gone gaunt with a greater paleness than its preset, and he muttered something along the lines of needing the bathroom before disappearing, rigid more in the form of a sculpture than a living thing. Nick listening for any sign of him down the hallway, hearing his own sniffling instead as the fresh look of his mother faded against the surface he’d banished it to face. To replace it, he did what he had slowly been building a habit of doing, thinking of her voice instead. Unlike the photo, they kept their comfortable distance while still retaining the warmth that he needed. No words in particular--those were fading fast, troublingly so, but Nick thought the memories might be better in abstraction. He could entangle himself in coos and single sounds, the sighs that followed a hand through his hair or the simple, solitary _miho_ that was a word in its definition, but little more than among the sounds to Nick’s ears untrained. It was his sound, and more than his name. More than Bottom by leagues. More than Nicolás, which he heard spiraling down the hallway to tie him down to reality again.

“ _ Nicolás! _ ” 

The name reverberated through the house’s tacky interior, drawing Nick out into the kitchen, to where his abuela stood at the forefront of a congregation of mothers that weren’t his. Peter lingered in the doorway, but he had become secondary the moment Nick met his abuela’s eyes and shrunk down forty relative sizes in comparison. She said something quick and biting in spanish, the starting pistol to a pitiful footrace of Nick trying to identify phrases he knew.  _ Donde está--Solo--Qué--Trago-- _ . He repeated certain words under his breath before squinting at Peter over his shoulder, where he seemed to gain an understanding. In response, he offered some slow, broken spanish of his own, worse even under the pressure of an audience than in his general practice. “No lo sabía...que...él necesita trago.”

As with all of Nick’s informal recitations, his abuela was far from pleased. He had come to understand, in the past few weeks of their isolation especially, that she saw in him twelve years of lost opportunity in accompaniment to every disagreement she had ever held with his mother over parental practice. Teaching flew from here as soon as it became clear Nick was no proper sounding board, echoing back a muffled reflection of her frustrations. An audience could not have slowed her if it had been made up of an entire army, and she quickly spat back with a lecture Nick could only keep up with in its intensity. He cut in with worthless alleviations (“Lo siento, abuela” and “No entiendo, abuela”, those phrases he returned to as often as he did his own room afterward) until she grew tired of him and moved on. From the fridge, she found bottles of agua fresca which she deposited directly into Peter’s arms, and from the cupboard, she produced a glass case from which she transferred several pastries onto a plate, shoving that in Peter’s hands as well. Finally, she dropped into one language the same way Nick had done for the other, mutely conscious of her own hypocrisy. If they were better to one another, they might have found some common ground in it. If no one was buried, it might have been a point of humor. “For you boys,” she said. 

Peter nodded, and in the gaping hole of space left afterward, he followed Nick back into the hallway. With some reluctance, Nick took the plate from him, acting in effect of the aftermath of a lecture on what was likely his hospitality. He felt a well of displeasure in his stomach like nothing before his mother’s passing, like something new. Like he’d chosen faithfully to disregard but had recently lost the ability to do so. He tried to speak, finding that he wasn’t fast enough. Peter interrupted him, if you could interrupt a person before they had even begun. “You’re lucky no one else could come,” he said, trying and failing to twist the cap off of the juice he’d received. “They would have made fun of you for crying.”

Nick traded the plate back, taking the drink and pulling the cap off in one motion. “Thanks,” he managed. He wouldn’t let his english leave him when it was all he really had. “For coming over, I mean. I don’t really care about the other guys. They’re not as...cool.” He narrowly avoided a deadly slip of the tongue, where ‘cool’ drew too closely to ‘cute’. Where the present drew too close to the locker scrawl.

Peter blushed all the same. “They’re okay.”

“It’s probably better that it’s just us.”

The two of them withdrew to Nick’s room with an odd sort of airiness, stepping from the hot shadow of the hall into the cool sunlight. On the TV, the game idled in the same place it had been for however long now. Peter looked for his controller on the floor, and even briefly, as he set the pastries and drinks aside, the light shone on gentle orange on the side of his face, white where it was most intense. “Better with just us…,” he echoed under his breath, incomparably soft in sound and look. No, not incomparable. Like what the radio played before company came over, perched in the window and doling out wind and string and piano overtop of the hum of the fan on the coffee table. Controller in hand, Peter indicated the TV screen. “You’re not going to get tired of winning?”

“I can teach you some more moves if you want.”

Implications began to bloom out of Nick’s boldness and pile up on the carpet between them: That they would sit close to one another and that Peter might offer up his hands again, for teaching. 

“Swear you won’t tell anyone,” said Peter.

“I swear,” said Nick.

‘fag,’ said Peter’s locker in thick, smeared ink.


	13. Pyramus and Tragos

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Peter Quince and the rest of his newly christened band of actors would love nothing more than to leave the past behind them, the past is swift, stupid and unavoidable. Yet, as cruel as it is, Peter strives to make the best of a bad situation.

Just before the egregious error, Peter set his laptop down on the ground and prevented himself from knocking with his injured hand. A part of him had forgotten about it (despite how cumbersome it was), but another part had dared him to go ahead, knowing full well how much pain it would cause. It had come from staring at his own writing for too long, reading each and every word back and letting it burn a new migraine behind his eyes, like an internal source of stale sunlight. Since it came with the knowledge that the words were his own, that he had brought them into the world of his own volition, that part of him demanded just punishment. He shelved the feeling, giving room to the bit of exhilaration that came from being on Nick’s doorstep. Breathing inward, he knocked again, several times.

“Bottom! Bottom! Bottom, it’s Peter! Bottom!”

It was like an alarm, but Nick had truly been sleeping. He had his eyes closed, and he was in bed, but he had been stuck between sleep and movement for what felt like hours. His phone had rung, buzzed and slid off his bedside table in agony, and he hadn’t moved, feeling like whatever limbs he had moderate control over were weighted down, like his eyelids were weighted down. His mood was weighted down. When he was younger and she was alive, his mother liked to compare him to a balloon. Whether or not he had been freshly remembering it, it came to him as he opened his eyes and stared at the wall. A mural of his thoughts unraveled there, where it was beige and undecorated. They went to some kind of fair or market or some other backdrop that didn’t matter. He told her he was going to be famous. What she looked like then, how she sounded, was lost in a collage of versions of herself from later on, resulting only in Nick’s inability to picture exactly how she’d reacted. Maybe she laughed at him. Maybe she frowned and folded her arms, like his abuela. “I’m afraid you’re going to float away from me if I don’t hold onto you, sometimes,” she said. Soft. Or bitter. Or resentful. 

Nick shut his eyes as tightly as he could, waiting for stars to form before he rolled out of bed to address the knocking, growing ever more enthusiastic the longer it was left alone. Although his apartment was small, it still took too long to traverse on a crutch, and by the time he remembered his current state of dishevelry, he was already at the door without the willpower to go back. Seeing Peter fully primped through a crack in the doorway made him feel worse. He didn’t feel like a balloon.

“I didn’t think you were home. I tried to call,” said Peter, picking his laptop up off the ground. His hair was shining white in the sunlight, but he fought the shadows under his eyes.

“I didn’t really...feel like getting out of bed.” Nick said back, scratching at a bit of his face he thought he might need to shave if he found the energy.

Peter giggled as if it was the only natural way to advance the conversation, and he already had one foot placed in the doorway to assert the fact that he wanted to enter. “Thank God it’s friday, right?” 

Knowing nothing else, Nick let him in, regretting it the moment he remembered the dishes and the laundry and the nuances of decor he hadn’t managed to find embarrassing before. The light bled in through the blinds, and from above, the neighbors were playing old french music, the kind from the 60s that might have been charming in another context. For now, it framed the space of Nick’s living room like an old VHS that could have been bought but was instead recorded from the TV for lack of funds. Peter set his laptop on the kitchen counter, looking around as if he was in wonderland. The ceiling said something in french.

“I wanted you to look over the script before rehearsal today,” Peter said in english. 

He smiled, but there were still the shadows under his eyes, more there when Nick responded, also in english. “We have rehearsal?”

Peter looked at him as if it wasn’t english. “I thought I sent something in the group chat.”

“There’s a group chat?” Nick felt the thing in his chest that was preventing him from feeling anything like a balloon. He wouldn’t know how to describe it in words beyond the fact that it was a jumble of words themselves. Sounds. Peter standing in the woods, a mosaic of blood on his face.  _ Nobody wanted you to fucking come. None of the guys are going to come looking for you _ . 

“Shit, I forgot I needed to add you--but that’s okay.” Peter looked out of place in the kitchen, small and blond and shaped like clay from the mold of an intense effort to look good. He already had his phone out, and somewhere in the bedroom, on the floor, there came the buzz of a test message. “I was going to come over and see you regardless.” 

While he smiled, that part of Peter begged for justice again. He propped himself against the counter and opened his laptop to distract from it, beckoning Nick closer in the meantime. In the time it took him to traverse the kitchen (and it took Nick some time for a few short steps), Peter remembered every part of him that existed beyond his face. Yes, his leg was still very broken. “Sorry. Jesus, uh. Sorry. Should we sit?”

“It’s okay,” Nick lied. 

He wasn’t good at lying, but by the time his face was a foot away from Peter’s, to where he could kind of see the words on the screen without his glasses, Peter had completely lost focus. With Nick at his shoulder, he was a useless puddle of delight, giggling enough to be comparable to a teenager if Nick had any memory of him doing that sort of thing when they were younger. He didn’t.

The script was far from a simple revision. In places where it had been previously sparse, it grew incredibly detailed, but not to its aid. Flowery language bloomed in excess out of the ashes of a tragedy Peter had thrown together, painting feelings and settings with more vigor than even God would have hoped to accomplish in genesis. There was light and darkness and everything in between among the lines, shrouding the original purpose of the text as if it had gotten as deeply lost in the woods as its author had. Yet, instead of eventually finding its way out, its breath of air after being so submerged, it devolved into the unrelated--the roles toward the end of the document faded into pure poetry, imagery and stream of consciousness. Truly, rather than an end, it simply trailed off. Nick was afraid to ask, but he felt he had to. “Is it done…?”

Peter shook his head. He still couldn’t focus, not with how hot his face had become. “I don’t know. Do you like it? I wanted to write something you would like. What sorts of things do you like, I don’t even know.”

“Oh. Uh. I like…,” Nick trailed off, scrolling back up to where the document was still in script format. “I mean. I didn’t mind the old script.”

“But it’s not good enough. I want it to be perfect,” Peter insisted; his face was so hot he thought it might melt, but it was now more from a growing sense of frustration in himself. He was returning to a feeling he’d had in the early morning, at the point where the format of the script was beginning to fade away, where he was spread out on the living room floor because he couldn’t get comfortable in bed. He was through a generous glass of cheap wine, and light came in through the window to sting his face, mocking him with the fact that he hadn’t slept all. He refused to cry over it--even if he wanted to--because he was an adult. Instead, he sat still, reading his writing over and loathing himself.

“I guess I get that,” Nick mumbled, searching for any combination of words that he liked; yet, that would first require him to have a greater understanding of what he liked in general. Something cool, but he didn’t really know what his mind meant by ‘cool’.  _ Like that one Pyramus speech _ , he thought. But he couldn’t picture the speech beyond the sound of his own voice, the pump of his heart in his chest when he had performed it and the faces of his audience. They weren’t smiling because it was cool, were they? Because it was perfect? 

Peter extended an index finger, holding it just shy of touching the screen. “I can’t stand this bit. Actually, I can’t stand any of this, from the beginning of the scene to the next two scenes. It’s just not how I want it. I don’t know what it is,” he said, biting down on his lip and letting a bit of his old frustration show through on the surface. 

Behind him, Nick shrugged, even if it went unseen. “Maybe...adding me in was a bad idea,” he said slowly; as the words rolled out, he surprised himself.

“No, no, no...No. No version of this exists without you in it,” Peter said back. 

He was caught up in his own writing, scrolling angrily through it as his chin found his hand, and behind him, Nick felt a fleeting ounce of pride before he rid himself of it. Yet, like layers in the summertime, no matter how much he stripped away, he was still intensely uncomfortable.”Maybe…,” he mumbled, “...We could just worry about it later.”

Peter’s head pivoted around to face Nick again, and he frowned in the very unfamiliar sense that his expression had nothing to do with what Nick had said; Nick wasn’t the thing that was upsetting him. In fact, Nick was the furthest thing from upsetting him. His face was soft and round and scruffy, and his eyes weren’t very vibrant today of all days, but they were calming coffee in the very least. Focus. “Yeah, okay, but how do I put worrying on hold?” he asked. Even though he wasn’t trying, there was the fact that he didn’t sound cute at all that was upsetting him now, too.

“Uh,” Nick searched for an answer in the wood of the kitchen cupboard and in a fliers he had stuck to his fridge. Takeout. Local craft show. Classical theater in the park. Old soup recipe. None of it was particularly helpful. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “Just...chilling.”

“Let’s chill, then,” Peter shot back, sounding a bit like a person that had never said that combination of words before in his life.

Nick thought of his bed. He wanted to be back in bed. He should have never gotten out of bed. When had he become so concerned with where he was in relation to his own bed? 

“We could watch a movie or something!” Peter continued. 

He’d been talking all this time, forgetting the script completely at the prospect of passing a casual few hours with the other--romantically, maybe. He’d said a number of things before he suggested a movie, and Nick tried to pretend he’d been paying attention the whole time. “A movie, yeah. That’s. Something.” Really, he meant to suggest that Peter leave, because he wasn’t sure why Peter hadn’t already left, or why Peter was here in the first place. 

Unfortunately, it was too late to suggest that. They were already moving to the couch for the next segment of what had to be a live bit of surrealist performance art. “What kinds movies do you like?” Peter pressed.

“What kind of movies do  _ you  _ like?” Nick echoed, because he didn’t want to talk about himself. 

Neither of them wanted to. Whether even one of them actually wanted to be there was still a suspended question that Peter held steady with his unending commitment to smiling and blushing and acting like everything Nick said was a memorable treasure. The closest he came to seeming like himself was a shrug in place of responding properly; though, instead of being irritated--per the norm--he was growing about as embarrassed over the idea of sharing his personal repertoire as a normal person might be over being caught in the nude (an idea that, at worst, stimulated him). He bit his lip and searched for something reasonable to say in place of the truthful expanse playing around on his tongue. “I’ll watch anything as long as it’s good,” he said, not sure what he meant, but proud of the fact that it wasn’t  _ technically  _ a lie.

Nick pinched the bridge of his nose, rubbed his eyes and discovered that he was more tired than he had originally assessed. He wished he’d taken up Peter’s offer to sit down sooner, even though it was his own home, and he was free to sit whenever he pleased; it was Peter’s distinct aura of being in charge that made him forget, and now both of his legs, injured and not, cried out to tell him he was a fool for letting that come to pass. “What’s your favorite movie?” he tried, drifting into that territory of trying to end the conversation as quickly as possible.

Again, Peter shrugged.

“Anything you like that came out recently? I probably have it. I have a lot of movies.”

It was as embarrassing as how Peter imagined being caught in the nude in an incriminating situation might be to a normal person. Like opening an oven and looking too far inside. He felt his face grow uncomfortably warm. Like sticking his head in the oven and pressing his cheek against the very back, where it was likely the warmest. “You probably don’t.”

“I probably do,” Nick replied, unintentionally fueled by challenge. “I have a bunch. All of  _ Star Wars _ . I’ve got  _ The Room  _ and  _ Room _ , which are actually pretty different. Uh. I just got a new copy of  _ Titanic  _ the other day, because I only had it on VHS. Um.  _ The Accountant-- _ oh, and I liked  _ The Magnificent Seven _ a lot.  _ Passengers _ , like with the girl from  _ Hunger Games  _ and Chris Pratt. He’s really cool. Oh, shoot, and  _ La La Land _ , I watched that one a couple of, uh, a couple of times, and--”

After he had only just begun to get used to the sound of his own voice again, Nick noticed Peter staring at him, intensely, as if every single word was one worth recording as a part of history, and he was returned once again to his settling fatigue. Immediately, he shrunk back at the touch of Peter’s fingers against his chest, gentle as it was. If there was ever a time to be a balloon, and to float away and not come back, he thought that this might be it, because he was so deeply confused that he wasn’t sure how to proceed. “Sorry,” he said, quieter, nearly lost among the music from up above.

Peter drifted close enough to the other with the excuse of being able to hear him. He shook his hand, bringing his hands to Nick’s face, resting at his jaw. “You know, I really, really love you,” he murmured. 

The problem with the touch was that Nick could feel it, definitively, in the itch in his facial hair, which was the same as the one from his previous dream. 

He reclined with the fairy queen spilling over top of him, and while he made little effort to seek the world beyond her, he was sure of the several presences in accompaniment, some of them playing soft music at her bidding, others running fingers through his hair. There was music then, as well, something to the same aesthetic effect of a language he didn’t understand at a muffled volume. She told him she loved him, doted on him, and then he awoke, the only difference between then and now in Nick’s sense of self. He hadn’t thought of sleep in the same way then. It was a passing leisure as opposed to what it had become: a temporary blessing on nonexistence. Such a notion had only occurred to him once in the previous dream, with his hands guided languidly around the curves of the queen’s hips--that it would be better if he weren’t there. In that sense, the dreams were the same, in addition to the fact that they had to be that. That is to say, dreams.

“Peter?” Nick mumbled, pulling back from the other’s approaching lips.  _ You don’t know how to read a fucking room. You hateful piece of shit _ . “Peter, what’s your favorite movie? I want to know.” 

“Yorgos Lanthimos.”

“What?”

Peter’s hands fell back down, at Nick’s chest again, where Peter’s eyes were. With his fingers, he made a loose triangle, resting his forehead in the center, where the steady rise and fall of Nick’s breathing distracted from another growing headache--one that seemed to rise from nothing aside from the shallow well of Peter’s personality, which he was trying desperately to repress. There wasn’t a bit of it that he didn’t hate. “Yorgos Lanthimos. He’s a director. He did...He did  _ The Killing of a Sacred Deer _ . And also  _ The Lobster _ . Which is my favorite.”

“What’s it about?” Nick asked; if he’d seen it, he didn’t remember it.

“This guy trying to find love. If he doesn’t, he gets turned into an animal, because supposedly, as an animal, he might have a second chance.”

Without saying very much else, Nick slid to the floor, cracking open the drawer to the greater part of his movie collection with Peter’s hands reaching loosely to grab hold of him again. The title repeated over and over on his tongue, and he wished his past self would have had the sense to organize the movies at all, either by title or genre. Instead, they were in random assortment, with the ones he’d watched the most recently pulled and stacked atop the DVD player. “Why do you like it?” he asked, fingers filing past one row and onto another.

“It doesn’t matter, really,” Peter replied from behind him.

“I want to know.”

There was a pause, and Nick opened another drawer. Peter curled the fingers on his injured hand ever so slightly, finding that, by the time that were something of a fist, he was putting himself in a just amount of pain. He was quieting a part of himself. “I like directors who have a lot of...I guess...vision. Or, they have some kind of impact. Um. Lanthimos had this other film called  _ Dogtooth _ that I saw that...I don’t know. It’s just really...I mean. I really wish I could do something like that. Like Hitchcock or Del Toro or Edgar Wright, where it’s...like. It’s something. And people talk about it.”

“You want to be famous?” Nick mumbled as his index finger came to rest over a letter L.

“I want to be. Um. Shit. More than I know I’m probably capable of, I think. You read the script. It’s not good. It wasn’t good before. I’m never going to be anything.”

Pulling the DVD out from the line, Nick glanced over his shoulder, and for a fraction of a second, he caught Peter’s face--his genuine face--before it dissolved into another smile. He looked fleetingly passionate, diffident and very much like he did when they were both younger. Then, it dissolved into whoever the present dream was about.

“It doesn’t matter though,” he continued. “It doesn’t matter. Because I can just forget that and spend more time with you.”

It was a struggle for Nick to get back onto the couch from the floor, and by the time he succeeded, he was too exhausted to pay to movie as much attention as he felt he should. However, as tired as he was, he couldn’t bring himself to fall asleep again, sitting instead through the repeated apologies of Peter curled at his side, verbalizing how sorry he was for nuances and moments in the narrative that he likely held very dear but was now ashamed of in company. The part of him that categorized  _ The Lobster  _ as his favorite wasn’t present anymore. This was the part of him where the lines turned to sonnets, resting his head on Nick’s shoulder and ignoring it when he was made incapable of watching the movie at all, for his vision faded out from the unattended increase of his migraine. Nick felt too heavy to move again, and his jaw was too stiff for it to open in time for a bit of sympathetic sentiment. Instead of becoming words, they would remain thoughts:  _ I’m never going to be anything either _ ,  _ so it’s okay _ .


End file.
